ABSTRACT
Perhaps children have become more skillful, or perhaps Catherine Moreland really was exceptionally poor at drawing, because Jane Austen’s description of this 8-year-old’s drawings would be more appropriate nowadays for those of a 5-year-old. However, it is certainly true that young children’s drawings do tend to look very much alike. Once children get beyond the scribbling stage their drawings typically consist of combinations of dots, round areas enclosed by curved outlines, and more or less straight lines. Even drawings of rectangular objects such as houses or cubes are often drawn using a curved outline enclosing a round area.
