With respect to the legs, we find, as in the primitive frontal view, an
insertion of both. An ordinary child can still less represent a human
figure in profile with only one leg showing than he can represent it
with only one eye. As a rule, so long as he is guided by his own inner
light only he does not attempt to draw one leg over and partially
covering the other, but sets them both out distinctly at a respectful
distance one from the other. The refinement of making the second foot or
calf and foot peep out from behind the first, as in Fig. 29 (_a_) (p.
359), and possibly also Fig. 18 (_c_) (p. 349), shows either an
exceptional artistic eye, or the interference of the preceptor.
[Illustration: Fig. 37.]
The treatment of the feet by the childish pencil is interesting. It is
presumable that at first no difference of profile and front view
attaches to the position of the foot. It has to be shown, and as the
young artist knows nothing of perspective and foreshortening, and,
moreover, would not be satisfied with that mode of delineation if he
could accomplish it, he proceeds naturally enough to draw the member as
a line at right angles to that of the leg. This is done in one of two
ways, in opposed directions outwards, or in the same direction,
answering to what we should call the front or the side view. At first, I
believe, no significance of front and side view is attached to these
arrangements. Thus in some sketches by a little girl of four and a half
I find the primitive front view of the head combined with each of these
arrangements of the foot. In drawings, too, of older children of six and
upwards I have met with cases both of a profile representation of head
and trunk with spread-eagle feet, as also of a side view of the feet
with a front face (see Figs. 5 (_a_) and 13 (_c_), pp. 339, 345). This
last arrangement, I find, appears in a profile treatment of the whole
leg and foot among the drawings of North American Indians (Fig. 37); and
this suggests that the side view in which the two feet point one way is
more easily reached and fixed by the untutored draughtsman.
[Illustration: Fig. 38.]
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