Art Education
Mind, in his eighth year, was placed at the academy for poor children, which Pestalozzi had previously instituted at Neuenhof, near Bern, Aargau. In the year 1778, in this authentic account of that institution, published by the Economic Society of Bern, the following short notice:—"Friedly Mynth of Bossi (Mind of Pizy), of the bailliwick of Aubonne, resident in Worblaufen, very weak, incapable of hard work, full of talent for drawing, a strange creature, full of artist-caprices, along with a certain roguishness: drawing is his whole employment: a year and a half here: ten years old."
It is not known how long he remained at this academy; somewhere between the years 1780 and 1785, he came to the painter Sigmund Hendenberger at Bern. With him, Mind learnt his art of drawing, and colouring with water-colours. Mind's education dealt mostly with art; he could with difficulty be made to write his name, and he had not the slightest idea of arithmetic.
Mind's special talent for representing cats was discovered and awakened by chance. At the time when Hendenberger was painting that since-published picture of the peasant cleaving wood before his cottage, with his wife sitting by, and feeding her child with pap out of a pot, round which a cat is prowling, Mind cast a broad stare on the sketch of this last figure, and said in his rugged, laconic way, "That is no cat!" Hendenberger asked, with a smile, whether Mind thought he could do it better. Mind offered to try; he went into a corner, and drew the cat, which Hendenberger liked so much that he made his new pupil finish it out, and the master copied the scholar's work.
Read more about this topic: Gottfried Mind
Famous quotes containing the words art and/or education:
“We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd.... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)