“Prodigy is analogous to the divine right of kings – always present, a force beyond argument or development.”
Robert Hughes, Anatomy of a Minotaur, Time, 1st November 1971.
“In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now.”
Samual Johnson, Boswell Life vol. 1, p. 4 (2 July 1763)
“When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”
Pablo Picasso when visiting an exhibition of children’s art quoted by Ronald Penrose in Picasso: His Life and Work. London: Victor Gollancz LTD, 1958, P. 275.
The general public are fascinated by tales of youthful precocity and infantile genius and as a teenager I was equally entranced by such stories. The art of child prodigies turn normal artistic appreciation on its head – works are admired, not for their intrinsic quality - but for their biographical demonstration of youthful precocity. In fact, often - very ordinary paintings are praised simply because of the young age of the artist. This is part of the freak show quality of the art of prodigies. But in great art historical terms the efforts of young prodigies are only of significance because of what they are thought to anticipate – mature works of genuine originality and mastery. Art historians do not look in awe at Picasso’s early works - but they are fascinated by how it laid the foundations for his later masterpieces.
Prodigies in painting are rare. It takes at least ten years for a painter to become a master of his craft and at least another ten before he can paint with any real authentic originality. On the evidence of art history what we can say for sure is that some artists are born gifted with a ‘touch’ and regardless of when they begin painting their work is instantly distinguished by a maturity of line, understanding of design and natural facility with paint. On the other hand, the development of other great artists was painfully dawn out. So much so that on the evidence of their early work - one wonders at their courage to persevere for so long. Artists like Cézanne, van Gogh and Pollock all of whom are now considered undisputedly great artists, had to fight many inner demons before they could reach a point of freed up expression. I was one of these latter artists.
From the age of eleven, I longed to become a world-class painting and drawing prodigy. Why did I want to be a child prodigy? Because I was desperate to be loved and admired by my family that thought little of my gifts! Perversely in an era when anything could be art, and anyone could be an artist – I looked back not merely to academic art but to academic art produced by child prodigies! And I did not believe I had the right to call myself an artist - unless I matched the early efforts of the greats of Western painting before breaking the rules! Moreover, the more alienated I became from the world – the more I viewed my intelligence as beyond the understanding of the normal world. But try as I might I never achieved my goal. Although through dogged self-training I did achieve a level of proficiency unusual in one so young - my work was full of the clumsy, crass and mannered mistakes of the self-taught. Failing to become a child prodigy was just the first in a long series of artistic benchmarks that I failed to achieve.
However, I could never have been a child prodigy, because for one thing, nobody really cared for me as an artist apart from myself, and my art was in some ways better than child prodigy art in its expressive honesty - but that very honesty and intensity of feeling made even my early work unpalatable to the bourgeoisies. I simply refused to play up to what others thought of as beautiful or artistic.
Yet there has been no time in my life - when I have not been drawing. Between the ages of say two and eight I showed only a moderate ability, though my work from the age of eight and ten showed much greater promise. Just when the interest in art of other children my age was fading - mine was increasing. I vividly remember receiving my first professional artist’s paints and 'canvas-boards' from an eccentric schizophrenic middle-aged lady - who was a keen Sunday painter and lived in our flat in Tara - I was just eight. I was no teenage prodigy, my first and only attempt - at the age of twelve - to enter the Texaco art competition for children found me not even in a runners-up position. Yet it seemed that no set back or lack of encouragement could deter me from pursuing my dream of becoming an artist. Soon by my mid-teens, I was not only painting to a higher standard than that of most Texaco winners, but I was also painting to a standard sometimes as good as that of many renowned young artists in art history (however, my work was tainted by pathological and sexual disturbance.) From the age of ten until the age of sixteen, I spent every hour I had learning about perspective, drawing, and working with, pencil, charcoal, pastels, watercolour, and oil paint. I also attended, over thirty-five (three-hour long) watercolours classes with Bryan Byrnes (a marine painter and watercolourist) and over ten (three-hour classes) in oil painting with Bryan McCarthy (a photo-realist oil painter.) All my art teachers in School (my beloved Mrs Gabler in Sandford Park Prep School, Miss Gibson in Greendale Community School, and my hero Mr. Shiel in Sandymount High School) recognized that I had exceptional talent and vocally praised me. In 1985, at the age of fourteen, I was chosen with three other classmates to undertake a Eucharist banner project for Kilbarrack Church. But overall, I maintained a low profile in school. At the age of just sixteen, I left school for a year and pursued my art full time, and it was the work I began in 1987 and continued with after returning to school, which was to lead to my greatest early form of recognition. In 1989 at the age of eighteen - I was successfully admitted to Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design based on my exceptional talent - I had no school qualifications to my name. Despite successfully entering Art College, I was to get into a physical fight with the principal's son – dismally underperform and fail to regularly attend Dun Laoghaire. So, after only a year I was expelled! In a type of institution where it is almost impossible to be expelled - my expulsion was extraordinary.
So, we have established that I was a talented but not truly precocious young artist. I was born with no natural facility - and what creative gains I did make came from years of intensive study and largely auto-didactic training. A largely self-taught artist, my method of self-education was both novel and highly ingenious. Rather than emulate the mature efforts of the masters. I began a historical study of the barely known early works of the great artists. By pitching my own efforts against the teenage works of Schiele, Picasso, Orpen, Seurat, Degas, and Lautrec at a similar age as myself - I was able to establish a kind of classroom of historical examples. Perversely in an era in the late 1980s when anything could be art, and anyone could be an artist – I looked back not merely to old academic art but to academic art produced by child prodigies in the late nineteenth century! And I did not believe I had the right to call myself an artist - unless I matched the early efforts of the greats of Western painting before breaking the rules!
While the history of art is littered with anecdotes about the early brilliance of great painters like Giotto, Raphael, and Michelangelo, for the most part these early achievements must be taken on faith, since we have very little to go on. Did students in the Fifteenth century draw any differently than children of today? Looking over the remains of Fifteenth century art, one would be hard pressed to find any examples to answer this inquiry. By looking at the work of many of its brilliant painters one might presume - they did not. In fact, one might assume that Michelangelo and Raphael never drew a wrong line or hack design. Of course, the truth is that failed works were ruthlessly destroyed. Or later, even re-ascribed. If the art connoisseurs are to be believed any flawed painting ascribed to a master, must inevitably the work of a less talented studio assistant! And following on from that - any masterpiece produced in a master's studio must inevitably be by the master's hand!
Since the Renaissance, there have been countless artists who started their training precociously early. Nevertheless, almost without exception their early efforts were not preserved. One must remember that when we look at historical artefacts, that their preservation has come about from theoretical expansions in what was once considered worthy of study and preservation. Until the ninetieth century, the efforts of children were not thought worth keeping. Those works that do survive were either the artefacts of the powerful and wealthy or of historical importance and until the Eighteenth-Century art was not part of the educational curriculum. Painting and drawing had not been part of the curriculum since antiquity and until the eighteenth century only two kinds of children were normally given any training in art, those that were meant to become professional artists and those who were of aristocratic well to do parents. The rise of the Academies in the late eighteen-century brought about the emergence of schoolroom accolades – gold, silver and bronze medals for drawing and painting – which is how many of these works were persevered (because of their excellence.)
Until the Ninetieth Century many zones of creative production – such as that produced by apprentices, child-prodigies, non-Europeans, and the insane were not considered art. All of this changed in the late ninetieth century when the Romantic notion of genius extrapolated by the likes of Goethe created an interest in how men of genius were formed. Thus, there is more student work preserved by artists in the ninetieth century than all the preceding centuries combined. Picasso of course is the most notorious teenage prodigy in the history of art - because unlike his countless (and probably more talented predecessors) Picasso was a nineteenth century prodigy whose every scribble and sketch - his parents, academies and contemporaries thought worth preserving. Most of these works are now in the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, where over two thousand works by him from 1890 until 1904 are held.
So, art history is full of stories of young promising artists – but 90% of them amount to nothing in the end. As Picasso who knew better than most: “Unlike music, painting has no place for child prodigies… What is taken to be precious genius is actually the genius of childhood… It vanishes with age, without a trace. A child of that kind might one day become a genuine painter, or even a great painter. But he will need to start from scratch.” (Pablo Picasso, Brassaї, Conversaciones con Picasso, Madrid, Aguilar. 1966, pp113.) Talent can only bring an artist so far and then no further. The very greatest artists of all time possessed both innate genius plus a dogged work ethic. Many young artistic prodigies are the attention-seeking children of frustrated artistic parents – even art teachers. In such cases only time will tell if art is a passion or merely a duty for them. I am reminded of Anton Raphael Mengs – whose father used to push drawing pads and pencils into his cot – bring him as a youth around the courts of Europe and trained his son for greatness. Mengs achieved a high degree of technical skill in his art – but it was all to no avail – his work remained academic, mannered, and unfeeling (quite typical in fact to many stunted prodigies.) Which reminds me again of Picasso – whose father Don José Ruiz Blasco - was also an art teacher. I have always felt a little sorry for Don José. Around the age of nineteen Picasso stopped signing his paintings Ruiz and started signing them ‘Picasso’ (his mother’s name), a clear snub to his father. Picasso and most of his biographers (Richardson less so) have played down Picasso’s father’s decisive role in his early formation as an artist – but it is quite clear to me in everything he did from nine to sixteen.
Much of the excitement and joy surrounding child prodigies - is to see little people - act like they are adults. But that is what they are mostly doing – acting like adults. Children have a tremendous gift for mimicry. But great art transcends mere acting and achieves genuine, hard-won authenticity. To do that, children must go through the trauma of adolescence and become adults - fully aware of their true nature, flaws, and limitations. In fact, it could be argued that the cult of children’s art that started between to the World Wars and really took off after the Second World War, was the escape of adults back to the supposed innocence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau inspired childhood, after the horrors of adult brutality.
Child prodigies are like circus freaks – amusing and astounding the public with their mimicry of adults. Child prodigies are mostly art world mascots – recognised for excelling in a confirmation of the worldview of their elders. They may have exceptional talent at drawing or painting, but usually their art world success is the result of cunning support, promotion, hype, and sales-talk by their parents and those enlisted to sell their work to the world. While the public knows most artists because they have spent their lifetime pushing their art into the public arena - child prodigies are more like outsider artists patronised by art world insiders who do the pushing for them. So, most child prodigies are pawns in a larger game they can hardly comprehend. For so many prodigies, this kind of success can be corrupting - because they fail to develop. Many are just over-indulged brats who never encounter the resistance of the real world. So, their art is a frothy concoction of unearned, talented self-indulgence and conceit. And when the world finally resists and demands real profundity from these arrogant little pups – they collapse in on themselves revealing their works hollow core - their affected and exaggerated talents exposed as a grand bluff. Eventually in their twenties they become adults, their art loses its meaning, and most fail to become artists in their own right.
Then there is the inestimable number of ‘child prodigies’ who were hot-housed by their parents and might have produced marvellous results, but once they were in their twenties and free from their parents domination, came to hate what their parents had done to them as golden children, and they gave up on art altogether.
Thus, most child prodigies are mere mascots for adults - who appropriate their talents for adult schemes - prodigies can barely comprehend. Their success is dependent upon them being usable for the agenda of adults. For example, I have frequently come across very talented young artists who like to produce adolescent, nihilistic, Gothic, Sadistic, Occult or even Nazi imagery, and I have felt very sorry for them, because they will never be given the recognition that young artists creating optimistic, socialist, multi-cultural or Feminist art that the Liberal art world really wants will achieve. So many talents are unwanted - because they fail the ethics test - and revolt the Liberal prejudices of the art world and society at large.
Even when genuine artistic prodigies do emerge, while they may show premature technical skill, their paintings never come close to matching the depth of experience, profundity, or technical virtuosity of their adult peers. Child prodigies usually make mediocre adult quality work at a young age, but almost without exception, they do not make exceptional quality work until they too are adults. At a certain point, the prodigy must question their own facility and break it down to rebuild it in a more profound way. So that while it is true to say that Picasso at thirteen possessed a great deal of technical ability - it is also true to say that he had nothing original to say in his work until he reached his mid-twenties. Indeed, a case could be made that the academic death of art in the nineteenth century corresponded to the rise of child prodigies. This is to say that when art was reduced to a pat academic formula without any possibility of growth the scene was set for the art of prodigies to find favour.
Some of my favourite prodigies were Anthony Van Dyke, Théodore Chassériau, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, John Everett Millais, Egon Schiele, and William Orpen.
One of the greatest painter prodigies of all time, Anthony Van Dyke was one of only a handful of child prodigies who fulfilled their early promise. His earliest surviving oil paintings produced when he was just fourteen - are remarkable technical accomplishments for one so young. Moreover, his drawings done between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two are remarkable for their spontaneous compositions, capture of movement and Old-Masterish inventiveness. However, it is in his allegorical figure-group compositions in oil on large canvases that he proved just how skilful, ambitious, and talented he was. Setting a group of figures within a landscape or interior is by far the most difficult test you can set a painter – and is frankly beyond the skills of 98% of all artists. Nevertheless, Van Dyke in canvases painted from the age of eighteen to twenty-two makes it all look like child’s play. By the age of twenty-two, Anthony van Dyke had already painted over 120 oil paintings, many of them huge multiple-figure, mythological scenes and were even more technically accomplished than anything Picasso achieved in his two major youthful masterpieces First Communion, 1896, and Science and Charity, 1897. However, Van Dykes early canvases are tainted by the overarching influence of Rubens – a master he would learn from but never surpass. Ultimately, Van Dyke for all his virtuoso skills – never had the kind of original personality, profound vision, or something meaningful to say, which all the true masters must also possess.
Théodore Chassériau was a precocious youth and admitted at the age of ten to the studio of Ingres – the great master of French Neo- Classicism. He was one of Ingres star pupils (proving again that most child prodigies need the skill and support of a great teacher to realise their full potential.) One day in class, Ingres saw what Chasseriau was drawing and said aloud to the class, “come see, gentlemen, come see. This child will be the Napoleon of painting!” His early paintings have the austere grandeur and gloom of the Spanish master Francisco de Zurbarán. However, Chasseriau’s later work married the sure line of Ingres with the rich colour of Delacroix (at a time when these masters were the heads of two extreme and conflicted poles in art.) In his short life, he painted some of the most beautiful and sensuous nudes in art history – but Chasseriau tragically died at the age of thirty-seven – a sad case of what might have been.
In sculpture the Italian Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculpted superbly gifted sculptures (carved in marble – the greatest test of the sculptor) at the age of twelve and thirteen and went on to capitalize on his early precocity to become the most technically stunning and emotive sculptor of the Baroque. Then there was John Everett Millais who displayed extraordinary drawing ability as young as the age of nine. If anything, Millais possessed more academic skill than Picasso, though in the long run that was to be to his detriment. For one of the great problems of the teenage prodigy in painting - is the tendency towards myopic infatuation with technical finish at the expense of emotional and existential growth (this is not surprising since many of these prodigies remained timid art school ‘nerds’ utterly unaware of real life in all its darkness, danger and profundity.) Millais greatest painting ‘Ophelia’ (1852) was painted between the age of twenty-two and twenty-three! It remains one of the few world-class masterpieces - by an artist under twenty-three (Raphael’s, ‘The Betrothal of the Virgin’, 1504, painted when the Italian was only twenty-one also springs to mind.)
Egon Schiele is unusual amongst child prodigies - because he gave full vent to the frustrations and pathologies of adolescence in his art. By the age of twenty, he was producing drawings of himself nude or of girls - in chalk, pencil and watercolour - that are some of the most visceral and exciting in art history. But most prodigies ended up like another favourite of mine – William Orpen. The pencil drawings and oil paintings Orpen made at thirteen to sixteen were some of his best work. Yet even at his best as a teenager his work never had the drama, intensity and rebellious virtuosity of Picasso at a similar age. Orpen was to end up as a rather ordinary portrait painter - more concerned with making money than in changing the course of art history.
In the late 1980`s (just as I realised I had dismally failed to become a teenage prodigy) there emerged a new teenage prodigy in America - a little Rumanian émigré called Alexandra Nechita. This prodigy made no attempt to draw realistically in the way demanded of nineteenth century pupils. Instead, she painted and drew to the standers of modernist masters like Picasso and Chagall. And her rewards were no meagre Gold or Silver medals in painting. Her rewards were the heights of art-market avarice! Nechita was described as that most rare of child prodigies an abstract cubist painter! Nechita`s first exhibition was at the age of eight, when she was ludicrously hailed as the ‘Petite Picasso’ – the fact is that Picasso had invented half of her mannerism (and Chagall the other half) while at the same time excelling in a naturalistic style of art utterly beyond her. In a post-modern world where the subtle distinctions between originality, innovation and genius were considered mute - it was utterly appropriate that the era’s teenage prodigy should be a mannered pastisheur. By her tenth birthday, she had already had eight solo exhibitions of her work and some of her canvases were selling for up to $40,000 each. Nechita`s canvases were indeed remarkable for one so young - but they added nothing to high art that had not already seen. Apart that is, from the phenomenon of her giftedness marketed and hyped by certain crass dealers and her family. Again, I would suggest that the case of Nechita signalled the bankruptcy of Modernism as a living artistic style. I never considered much of Nechtia’s work – it seemed to me to be utterly pointless for a child to paint like an adult trying to paint like a child!
Personally, I look upon many of the child prodigies of recent years (like Alexandra Nechita) with scepticism. Many of the ways in which they are judged - seem to me to be hopelessly modern and puerile. Art prodigies before the late twentieth century were judged great on the basis of their mastery of realist drawing and painting – which is not only the greatest test of a mature artist – but the most impossible of styles for the young. Today however young artists like Nechita are hyped on the basis of their mimicry of the signature styles of modern masters. The trouble is that the challenge of most modern art is not based upon the actual difficulty of the technique – but on the originality of the ideas and the formation of a uniquely personal style. Now anyone, young, old or infirm can mimic Monet or Picasso or Chagall on a bad day – but in art historical terms such copies have no value whatsoever – other than as training exercises.
Recently a new prodigy has emerged in England. Kieron Williamson who at ten has already become a media sensation and millionaire with his Edward Seago like pastiches of early French Impressionism. The trouble is Edward Seago was over eighty years out of date with his pastiches of early French Impressionism and Kieron Williamson compounds this by another sixty years. Williamson has a natural painterly touch, however his success is purely a thing of hype and like with so many other prodigies, his premature success could prove disastrous to his development as an artist of importance not just promise.
So, from the fake to the real deal. Although not the most technically accomplished child artist - Picasso was certainly the best-known teenage prodigy in painting - not only because of his early technical feats - but also because of the sheer volume of work that remains from his early years – and because of his later greatness. For example, before turning 20 Picasso had already produced approximately 220 oil paintings and 470 fully finished drawings. Not to mention approximately 1191 other drawings and sketches in 28 sketchpads (these figures are taken from Josep Palau i Fabries catalogue resume of Picasso’s early years 1891-1907 and a study of Picasso sketchbooks.) Picasso was to bring such drama and smouldering intensity to even the most rote academic exercises like drawing from plaster casts and drawing the life-model. Looking around the Museu Picasso in Barcelona at the start of August 1999 - I looked at his paintings and drawings and then the year when he had made them – only to shake my head in amazement and resigned defeat – then I had to chuckle at my desperate battle which had so dominated my teenage years. How could I have ever have thought I stood a chance! But I was not alone, every year in provincial cities around the world youthful artists have sensational exhibitions and are predicted future fame and then are vaporised by history when their so-called genius is never fulfilled. I was just another one.
As was mentioned earlier while most other child prodigies went on to have unspectacular careers, we all know how Picasso was to change art forever. That said if Picasso had died at 25, he would have only been of passing historical importance. One only has to compare his paintings from 1891 to 1907 with the mature work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec`s (another precious artist) or Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida paintings of the same period to see the inferiority of his work.
Regardless of all these coldly mature observations (written in middle age); it was prodigies like Schiele and Picasso that from sixteen to twenty-one - I was keenly in combat with. Thus, my early paintings were often about what it was like to strive to make great art at an early age - and to wring from oneself art that spoke of the conditions of youth.
The following artists are in my personal opinion the seventy-seven greatest youthful Western artists (1300-2012.) Those artists in the top twenty were truly gifted child prodigies. While those at the bottom of the list were artists who’s early work I was familiar with - but who were in no way preciousness in their youth. The list was based upon work still in existence - by the artists whom I have seen in the flesh or reproduction, and these artists between the age of nine and twenty created most of the work adjudicated upon. Emphasis was placed primarily upon the pure technical ability of the child and only secondly upon the depth and range of their work. Lastly, the emotional maturity and originality of their work was taken into account. As I have noted already despite his or her precious ability, virtually no artist in history has ever created a masterpiece of world significance before his or her twentieth-first birthday.
1. Anthony Van Dyke.
2. Théodore Chassériau.
3. Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
4. Pablo Picasso.
5. Primo Conti.
6. Albrecht Dürer.
7. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
8. Pol and Jean de Limbourg.
9. Jacob Van Ruisdael.
10. Salvador Dalí.
11. Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
12. Diego Velázquez.
13. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio).
14. Rembrandt Harmeszoon Van Rijn.
15. Michelangelo Buonarroti.
16. John Everett Millais.
17. Diego Rivera.
18. Angelica Kauffman.
19. Egon Schiele.
20. William Orpen.
21. Antonio Mancini.
22. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
23. Joseph Mallord William Turner.
24. Anton Mengs.
25. Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto.
26. Ary Scheffer.
27. Camille Claudel.
28. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun.
29. Maria Fortuny I Marsal (Mariano Jose Berardo Fortuny y Marsal.)
30. Géricault.
31. Patrick Heron.
32. Lucian Freud.
33. Antonio López Garcia.
34. Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida.
35. Kieron Williamson.
36. Antoine-Jean Gros.
37. Giovanni Boldini.
38. Pere Pau Montana.
39. James Ensor.
40. Albert Rutherston.
41. Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
42. Akiane Kramarik.
43. Bernard Buffet.
44. Max Beckman.
45. Ter Borch.
46. Alfred de Vigny.
47. Thomas Rowlandson.
48. Alexandra Nechita.
49. Balthasar Klossowski de Rola.
50. Edward Hopper.
51. Marcel Duchamp.
52. Otto Dix.
53. Willem de Kooning.
54. Patrick J. Tuohy.
55. Euan Uglow.
56. Jack B Yeats.
57. Amedeo Modigliani.
58. David Hockney.
59. Henri Cartier-Bresson.
60. Jean-Michel Basquiat.
61. Auguste Rodin.
62. Gustave Moreau.
63. Lovis Corinth.
64. Gustav Klimt.
65. Andy Warhol.
66. Peter Blake.
67. Marla Olmstead.
68. Joan Miró.
69. Claude Monet.
70. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
71. Keith Haring.
72. Edvard Munch.
73. Suzanne Valadon.
74. Eugène Delacroix.
75. Vincent van Gogh.
76. Damien Hirst.
77. Jeff Koons.