VI. Teaching Eurythmy, Music, Drawing, and Language

When I look at the drawings of a child, as primitive and sketchy as they are, I can find in each of them a confluence of the child’s perspective and the child’s primitive feeling of himself in his organs. In every individual line of a child’s drawing, we can see how the child attempted to put down what originated in the eye and attempted also to put down those things that originate in inner feeling. If you take a large number of children’s drawings and attempt to see how children draw arms and legs, you will see that that originates from an inner feeling. When you look at how children draw profiles, you will see how that originates from viewing. The drawings thus originate from two separate sources. The situation is even more interesting when you look at drawings done by children who have been unable to draw until a certain age. They draw more or less out of the intellect. Small children do not draw from their intellect; they draw from experience, from primitive views enlivened with a primitive feeling. I believe it is possible to always differentiate when a child draws a mouth: then the outline of the mouth has been seen. But when it draws teeth, that is in some way taken out of an inner feeling. If, however, you look at a child who has begun to draw only at the age of nine or ten and study the child’s drawings, you will see how the child actually often makes more beautiful expressionist drawings than the expressionists themselves. The child draws often with colored pencils and draws what it thinks, what it has thought up. It is often quite curious how children often draw something we do not recognize and will then say that it is a devil or an angel. The drawing does not at all look like an angel, but the child says this is an angel. In such cases, the child is drawing its own intellect; the child is drawing what it has thought up.