My mother and I took my six year old nephew to London today, to visit The Courtauld Gallery. This was not an instance of pushy middle class relatives inflicting extracurricular improving activities during the school holidays. He likes art galleries. Earlier in the holidays his parents took all three children to the Transport Museum and then the National Gallery, where my nieces apparently sat on a bench being bored, while my nephew pleaded with his mother to go and look at just one more room. I think the family logic of permitting today's expedition was that my mother knows how to look after children, while I know how to find my way around London, so between us we would probably manage to get there and back in one piece.
The Courtauld collection was the first major gallery my mother took me to see, before it moved into its present splendid home in Somerset House. It used to be somewhere down in Kensington. My nephew at three weeks short of his seventh birthday is younger than I was when I was introduced to the gallery habit, but has taken to it like a natural. His attention span is certainly no smaller than some of my adult friends.
In the first room he wasn't especially taken by the Gaugins, instead asking penetrating questions about the painted ceiling that my mother and I were unable to answer. Why were those angels scaring somebody with a horrid face? My mother pointed out the dots of the two Seurat paintings, and my nephew said that they must have taken ages to do. I confessed to finding Seurat's dots desperately irritating because the paintings were so static, and we moved on to the next room.
A crowd of people on an organised tour stood around the sad, resigned barmaid at the Folies Bergeres, but once they'd gone we were able to sit on the bench in front of it and contemplate. My nephew was struck by the glass bowl holding oranges, while my mother remembered her initial amazement at the gold foil on the champagne bottles. I pointed out the mirror behind the bar, and the reflection of the man talking to the barmaid and the audience who would really be behind us, and my mother explained that the barmaid's reflection wouldn't be where it was in the painting. My nephew got the idea of multiple or impossible viewpoints almost straight away, since we'd already been talking on the train about one of his drawings that included several London landmarks you couldn't see all at once in real life.
He spotted immediately and without prompting that the two Cezanne landscapes on opposite walls of the room were both by the same artist. I'd assumed that a child would like the post Impressionists in much the same way as they attract top bids at auctions, all those bright flowers and accessible subject matter. In practice my nephew seemed equally taken with the Gainsboroughs and the Georgian silverware, and wanted to know why the latter were in an art gallery and not a museum. Then we began to flag and went for our lunch in the cafe, where it turned out that my sister-in-law had been right to send her son off for the day equipped with a large tinfoil packet of ham sandwiches, since there really was nothing on the menu likely to appeal to a six year old.
After lunch my nephew wanted to see the Medieval and Renaissance art, and we spent some time looking at religious triptyches, before returning to where we'd left off. As we crawled on the floor to examine an Italian wooden chest painted with scenes of war, he countered my observation that it was very unfair on the horses who hadn't asked to be there with fact that many soldiers in the first and second world wars hadn't asked to be there either. Cranach's picture of Eve tempting Adam with the fruit while the serpent slithered above them in the tree had my mother and I struggling as he quizzed us about the exact terms of the expulsion from the garden of Eden, and whether the serpent was expelled as well.
Lely was quite well received, and then we were abruptly among the Fauvists. My nephew did not immediately decode splashes of paint as the bending figure of a man in one brilliantly coloured Vlaminck, though he liked it anyway, but he noticed for himself the thickness of the paint in another picture. He notices how paintings are framed as well.
I can't remember which major artist it was who said that almost all children under the age of six can paint well, and almost none can over the age of sixteen. Something over a year ago my nephew showed me one of his paintings. It was of trees in a landscape. Children's pictures of trees normally have the ground below, the sky above, the tree in the middle, and a gap between land and sky. This painting had a continuous foreground, middle distance, horizon and sky, with no gap. He'd given a clue before then that he was interested in paintings when he commented unfavourably on how dark part of a landscape that hangs in my parents' house was. Today we had perfectly sensible conversations about whether the sky was boring, heights of horizons within paintings, the idea of the colour wheel, whether gold and silver were colours, light versus dark shades of the same colour, what kinds of subject were painted when and why, the role of the rich patron and religion in art history, and symbols. My mother and I were keen to instruct, but my nephew gave as well as he got.
I think he is a bright kid. I think also we tend to underestimate children.
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