Marion Richardson , livre ebook

Intellect Books - Rosemary Sassoon

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

83 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

In Marion Richardson: Her Life and Contribution to Handwriting, Rosemary Sassoon looks at Richardson’s life and work through the artist and educator’s own writings as well as letters and personal recollections from those who knew and worked with her. The driving force behind a momentous shift in the way art is taught to children, Richardson is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking contribution to penmanship, devising two schemes based on her observations of the natural movements of young children’s hands. The result of extensive original archival research, this book includes many illustrations that depict Richardson’s inventive approach.

Sujets

Arts visuels

Éducation

Film

ART

General

Education

General officer

History of art

Performing Arts

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	27 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841505855
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Rosemary Sassoon
MARION RICHARDSON
Her life and her contribution to handwriting
The two sides of Marion Richardson s work. Dudley Market Place was painted by one of her pupils in 1914.
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2011 Rosemary Sassoon
Rosemary Sassoon has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-84150-543-5
Designed by Blacker Design, www.blackerdesign.co.uk
Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd, UK.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Part 1 Marion Richardson: her life
Childhood
An art student
Teaching at Dudley Girls High School
Her complex character
London and new challenges
The last years
Part 2 Marion Richardson s contribution to handwriting
Handwriting at the beginning of the twentieth century
The development of print script
The development of the Dudley Writing Cards
Details of the scheme
The development of Writing Writing Patterns
Writing Writing Patterns
Comments on Writing Writing Patterns
The legacy
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
First of all I would like to acknowledge the generous help given to me by Professor John Swift, whose unparalleled knowledge of Marion Richardson and her contribution to child art has taught me so much. In addition he has given permission for me to use several from his collection of photographs of children s paintings lodged in the Birmingham City University archive.
There are two other people without whose valuable and much appreciated assistance it would have been difficult to find the necessary information to write this book, as I am no longer able to travel to the archives myself: Clare Mason (n e Bennison) let me have access to her 1982 thesis on Marion Richardson and all the field work that she had laboriously gathered from many different sources, and Jean Weston who has tirelessly searched in much of the uncatalogued part of the archive at Birmingham City University, the Dudley archives and elsewhere as well as contacting past pupils for material and their reminiscences.
I would also like to express my grateful thanks to Sian Everitt, from the Marion Richardson Archive at Birmingham City University, Leonard Bartle, from the Lawrence Batley Centre for the National Arts Education Archive, Bretton Hall, archivists from the London University Institute of Education, the Bodleian and the Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool, and Abigail Morley, librarian of Benenden School.
My thanks, as always, go to Michael Blacker who has designed my books for many years and helped me to piece together the complex patchwork of text and illustrations that make up this biography.
Part 1
Marion Richardson: her life

Self portrait by Marion Richardson, aged 17 (reproduced from Art and the Child ).

Her life
It is not possible to think of anyone in the educational world today who so fully deserves some token of our general esteem , wrote Herbert Read in the editorial of the 1947 Issue of Athene , the Journal of the Society for Education in Art, dedicated to Marion Elaine Richardson. Her life s work was in the fields of both child art education and handwriting. In the teaching of art she is remembered for the stimulating of children s imagination and releasing their natural creativity through her innovative techniques of mind and word picturing. In the teaching of handwriting she eventually broke away from long accepted methods to realise the value of pattern and base her method and letter forms on what she had observed to be the natural movement of young children s hands.
Childhood
Her work is for the most part well documented, but relatively little is known about the private life of this remarkable woman. However, in order to assess the impact of her attainments, it is first necessary to explore, as far as possible, the influences on her life and character, set in the years leading up to and between the two world wars. She was born on 9 October 1892 at 10 Wellesley Villas, in Ashford, Kent, in the parish of St Mary the Virgin. Her father, Walter Marshall Richardson, was a master brewer and maltster. She came from a large family, in fairly comfortable circumstances. The 1901 census reveals that she had two sisters and three brothers between the age of 2 and 12. This also tells us that the household contained a governess and three domestic servants. Two of her three brothers were killed in the First World War. Only Donald survived.
Her mother, Ellen, related in the same issue of Athene that all through her early childhood her daughter Marion showed great powers of imagination and was fond of making up stories. After early lessons in the schoolroom she attended a small local day school. She enjoyed telling stories and at one time she joined a small pen club, called the Primrose Scribbling Club, according to her mother. She was the youngest member and adopted the nom de plume A mere girl . She continued her education at a boarding school in St Leonards-on-Sea established by the Church Education Corporation. In 1906 her family had moved from Kent so, at the age of 14, she entered Milham Ford School, Oxford. This was a sister school to the one at St Leonards. The school was ahead of its time in ideas of education and teaching methods and she would have been exposed to stimulating concepts from an early age. It was the art mistress there who recognised her talent and persuaded her to sit for an art teacher s scholarship at the Birmingham Municipal School of Arts and Crafts.
Marion Richardson s book Art and the Child was published posthumously in 1948. It was edited by her sister Kathleen. (Kathleen Richardson, also an art teacher, worked for many years at the Dragon School in Oxford.) We do not even know whether Marion Richardson would have written more had she lived longer, or whether anything had been edited out by her sister. Clare Bennison - whose extensive research for her 1982 thesis, Marion Elaine Richardson, Handwriting Pioneer, has been invaluable in the writing of this book - noticed in her search through the archive, that many of the draft pages were in the hand of Miss Plant, Marion s friend. Did she have any influence? Sian Everitt, curator of the Marion Richardson archive, remarked in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on the inaccuracies that occur in the book and its sentimental style, but at least it gives us some insight into her life and thoughts, otherwise we are very dependent on what others wrote about her. Touchingly, the dedication to this book was written and signed MR on 11 November 1946, the day before she died.
Little else about her personal life was revealed by her family. Most of what we can find out about the real person comes from comments by those who knew her (many of whom can no longer confirm or enlarge on their remarks). Therefore, we are dependent to a large extent on the small amount of her own written words to reveal any clues to her real feelings.
There are a few mentions of her early years from the beginning of Art and the Child . When I was a child I possessed a certain skill in drawing , starts chapter 1 in Art and the Child , and as I belonged to a big family, and we had grown poor, the possibility of my winning a scholarship in art was one we could not afford to overlook . What can be read into this other than Marion Richardson s innate modesty? Her self portrait when quite young shows considerable sensitivity and draughtsmanship. What is known of her early home life does not point to poverty. By 1906, however, her father had died and maybe all the family resources had to be directed towards the sons education, as was quite usual in those days. She continued that she was only sixteen when she sat for the entrance examination for the Birmingham School of Art. I hoped with all my heart that this best (a drawing of a crab s claw) would not be good enough to win a scholar s place. I did not want to leave school and had no interest in learning to draw. But, alas, the crab had caught me. The offer of four years training as a teacher could not be refused, and that autumn I became an art student. She continued in the same rather melancholy vein: As time went on, however, I grew more or less reconciled to the thought of my career, and indeed found great happiness in some of my work . Young though the age of 16 may seem today it was not so young in 1908. Many started at Birmingham at 11, although more usually at 13 or 14 , remarked John Swift.
An art student
Those who she came into contact with during those early years were strong characters themselves, in particular the director of the School of Art, Robert Catterson-Smith. He won me over completely as a disciple by teaching us to rely on our visual powers rather than on the skill of hand, and never to begin a drawing until we had a clear image of the subject.

Sketch of Marion Richardson as a student by H F Warnes (reproduced from Athene 4, Volume 1)
Catterson-Smith introduced Marion Richardson to many of the ideas she used and put into practice in later years with her own pupils. He had been familiar with, and probably himself been influenced by, the work of T R Ablett (1848-1945) on memory and drawing and in 1921 wrote of his own methods in his book Drawing from Memory and Mind Picturing , published by Pitman. Ablett had understood that children s scribbles were their attempts to express mental images of the world around