The chapters of the book were previously published in the North British Review
"The spreading recognition of drawing as an element of education, is one amongst many signs of the more rational views on mental culture now beginning to prevail. Once more it may be remarked that teachers are at length adopting the course which nature has for ages been pressing upon their notice. The spontaneous efforts made by children to represent the men, houses, trees, and animals around them - on a slate if they can get nothing better, or with lead-pencil on paper, if they can beg them - are familiar to all. To be shown through a picture-book is one of their highest gratifications; and as usual, their strong imitative tendency presently generates in them the ambition to make pictures themselves also. This attempt to depict the striking things they see is a further instinctive exercise of the perceptions - a means whereby still greater accuracy and completeness of observation is induced. And alike by seeking to interest us in their discoveries of the sensible properties of things, and by their endeavours to draw, they solicite from us just that kind of culture which they most need.
Had teachers been guided by nature's hints not only in the making of drawing a part of education, but in the choice of their modes of teaching it, they // would have done still better than they have done.
What is it that the child first tries to represent? Things that are large, things that are attractive in colour, things round which its pleasurable associations most eluster - human beings from whom it has received so many emotions, cows and dogs which interest by the many phenomena they present, houses that are hourly visible and strike by either size and contrast of parts. And which of all the processes of representation gives it most delight? Colouring. Paper and pencil are good in default of something better; but a box of paints and a brush - these are treasures. The drawing of outlines immediately becomes secondary to colouring - is gone through mainly with a view of the colouring; and if leave can be got to colour a book of prints, how great is the favour! Now, ridiculous as such a position will seem to drawing-masters, who postpone colouring and who teach form by dreary discipline of copying lines, we believe that the course of culture thus indicated is the right one. That priority of colour to form, which, as already pointed out, has a psychological basis, and in virtue of which psychological basis arises this strong preference in the child, should be recognized from the very beginning; and from the very beginning also the things imitated should be real. That greater delight in colour which is not conspicuous in children but persists in most persons throughout life, should be continuously employed as the natural stimulus of the mastery of the comparatively // difficult and unattractive form - should be the prospective reward for the achievement of form. And these instinctive attempts to represent interesting actualities should be all along encouraged; in the conviction that as, by a widening experience, smaller and more practicable objects become interesting, they too will be attempted; and that so a gradual approximation will be made towards imitations having some resemblances to the realities. No matter how grotesque the shapes produced: no matter hoe dambed and glaring the colours. The question is not whether the child is producing good drawings: the question is, whether it is developing its faculties. It has first to gain some command over its fingers, some crude notions of likeness; and this practice is better than any other for these ends; seeing that it is the spontaneous and the interesting one. During these early years, be it remembered, no formal drawing-lessons are possible: shall we therefore repress, or neglect to aid, these efforts at self-culture? or shall we encourage and guide them as normal exercises of the perceptions and the powers of manipulation? If by the supply of cheap woodcuts to be coloured, and simple contour-maps to have their boundary lines tinted, we can not only pleasurably draw out the faculty of colour, but can incidentally produce some familiarity with the outlines of things and countries, and some ability to move the brush steadily; and if by the supply of tempting-painted objects we can keep up the instinctive practice of making representations, however rough, it must // happen that by the time drawing is commonly commenced there will exist a facility that would else have been absent. Time will have been gained; and trouble both to teacher and pupil, saved.
From all that has been said, it may be readily inferred that we wholly disapprove of the practice of drawing from copies; and still more so of that formal discipline in making straight lines and curved lines and compound lines, with which it is the fashion of some teachers to begin. " (pp. 140-143)
[follows a critique to a drawing manual approved by the Society of Arts, by the sculptor John Bell]