In a corner of a room of Victorian paintings at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, a small boy is playing with a dragon puppet. He makes it leap up, down and around the huge painting in front of him. He dips it dangerously close to the shiny surface, almost touching, before taking a few small steps back and standing still and quiet for a moment, looking. He stares at the puppet on his hand, then back at the dragon in the painting, comparing the two. Then he shouts: 'Mum, mum - just look at that dragon in the big painting. It's fierce.'
The small boy is visiting the Walker's new Big Art for Little Artists space, the first children's gallery in a national art gallery. The painting he now admires is Frederic Leighton's Perseus and Andromeda, not an obvious choice for a four-year-old Spiderman fanatic to focus on. But Big Art is designed for children just like him, the under eights, as an introduction to the wider collection.
His first 20 minutes were spent in the dedicated children's gallery, but for the next hour (and more, if he'd had his way), he wandered among heavy gilt-framed masterpieces, pointing, ogling, admiring and puppeteering.
Small children and high art aren't an easy mix. The Henri Rousseau exhibition at the Tate Modern may have attracted primary school pupils, but how could it fail with paintings of wide-eyed tigers in the jungle and dancing monkeys. But how do you get a toddler to be inspired by the dark moods of Rembrandt? Or explain Auerbach to a five year old?
Big Art at the Walker has risen to this challenge. At first sight, this dedicated space isn't dissimilar to a well-equipped nursery. But look more closely, and you can see objects sitting safely in glass cases, such as a pride of lion sculptures from the decorative arts collection.
In another corner, or 'zone', there are puppets and dressing up costumes copied from characters in the Walker's paintings. In a Silly Sums display case, there are ten jolly jugs, nine clunky keys, seven spiky forks, five bright bottles, three wise owls and two tiny teapots - all from the collection.
Labels are sparse. 'We didn't want too much text, so we came up with signs and symbols - a visual language,' says Ann Bukantas, the curator of fine art at the Walker. A footprint trail takes a child from Big Art to an object or painting with a magnifying glass symbol beside it.
'As much as we want children to use the Big Art space, we want them to go out into the gallery,' says Bukantas. 'We want to use it as a starting point to other things.'
A child can put on a Henry VIII costume in Big Art and stride out into the main galleries, following the footprints until they find Holbein's portrait and pose beside it. Puppets such as the boy with his hands behind his back from Yeame's And When Did You Last See Your Father? and, of course, the dragon from Leighton's Perseus and Andromeda.
In many ways, Big Art is nothing new, just bigger and better funded. (The Walker received grants totalling £500,000 from the JP Jacobs Charitable Trust and the DCMS/Wolfson Foundation Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, as well as a private donation.) Many of the activities rely on the old stalwarts of activity sheets, a jar of pencils and a rail of dressing up clothes. And these tried and tested methods of engaging young children with the old masters seem to work.
Not everywhere, however. Some still believe that mixing kids and high culture - never mind the crayons - can only lead to a big mess. The Frick Collection in New York doesn't admit children under ten as 'irreparable harm can be done to an artwork in an instant… by a careless hand. Even a fingerprint can cause permanent damage'.
Admitting children, it says, 'would necessitate erecting numerous and varied physical barriers… That action would change fundamentally the experience of viewing the collection'.
Bukantas admits that directing young children to works of art in the main galleries did raise security issues. But she was determined that this wouldn't lead to a series of new ropes being erected in front of them. Instead, vulnerable work has been treated or covered in ways that mean they are less likely to be damaged.
But it's more than security that the introduction and encouragement of young visitors threatens. The very atmosphere and feel of a high art gallery is challenged. A desire for stillness, contemplation and control in places considered culturally important often militates against including children.
According to Hilary Gresty, the director of the Visual Arts and Galleries Association, that's because small children appreciate art in an essentially different way to adults. 'Little children like roaming around between works of art; it's a very physical thing,' she says. 'Galleries don't accommodate these sorts of responses.'
Brian Stewart, the director of the Falmouth Art Gallery in Cornwall, puts it more directly. 'You have to let go of the idea that a gallery is a quiet place. You must welcome noise.'
The Falmouth Art Gallery, this year's winner of the Guardian's Family Friendly Museum Award, has a well-founded reputation for introducing very young children to high art. The gallery does not have any 'over-sevens only' signs, as no child is too young. Stewart tells the story of seeing a nine-month-old doing 'baby painting' - having its hand and feet dipped in colours and painting on paper - in the centre of the gallery.
'I went up to the mother and said: "I'm sure she's looking at that painting behind you. I'm sure she is,"' he recalls. 'You need to surround people of any age with quality and let them absorb it.'
Falmouth generates many of its own exhibitions, which enables young children to be included from the start. 'That's essential,' says Stewart. 'To have children built in from the beginning, not just as a few add on activities later.'
But other, often larger, museums and galleries have to make the best of inheriting an exhibition from elsewhere. Julia Kirby, the public programmes manager at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, was faced with the Toulouse-Lautrec poster exhibition arriving without any family element. Kirby fell back on family trails. She also created an informal area, decorated like a Parisian cafe with little round tables covered in checked table cloths in the exhibition space where children could copy Lautrec posters and design their own.
Like many larger museums, Birmingham suffers from rigid departmental divisions. When I commented on the height of the posters and the accessibility of text accompanying them in the Lautrec exhibition, Kirby replied: 'That's a curatorial area.' She does not trespass.
With fewer staff, and therefore fewer divisions, smaller institutions are often able to be more innovative and take risks. The Falmouth Art Gallery is always experimenting with ways of including and enthusing young children, often using its regular Saturday drop-in sessions to test new ideas on families. If these are successful, they might then be used in more formal workshops.
But it's not only about small children entering and looking, it's also about them owning an exhibition. 'Museums are owned by everybody, so every citizen - including young ones - has a right to them,' says Mark O'Neill, the head of arts and museums at Glasgow City Council.
The council was determined that such ownership was 'not just statements of abstract principal', so in April this year it introduced an entitlement for every primary school child in its authority to have one museum visit per year. 'In a sense, it's giving them what they have already,' he says. The council's aim is that even very young children will develop a 'visual literacy' to appreciate and interpret art.
According to Stewart, ownership goes even further than being entitled to visit galleries, it also includes being entitled to have work hung in them. At the Falmouth Art Gallery, works by children in response to exhibits are treated with the same respect as the exhibit itself - as if, in effect, they were also 'high art'.
'At school, a child does their work, they work very hard at it, and the teacher says, "Very good". Then it's put in a pile, and gets dog-eared and dumped at the end of the term,' says Stewart. 'Of course, I wouldn't frame rubbish from a poor workshop, which even the child didn't think was very good. But if they've put effort into it, the fact that somebody actually frames and maintains their work professionally and treats it as if it were a work from the National Gallery is the most transforming thing.'
It's a small step from including work by children alongside established masterpieces to letting the children themselves decide what counts as 'high art'. For many of its exhibitions, Falmouth has young people choosing the work.
'If nothing else, it saves a great deal of time,' says Stewart. 'You should see how quickly they make the decisions. Work is put before them, and they know immediately whether they like it or not. The whole thing's over in an hour. It would take adults days.'
But do very young children really understand or appreciate Picasso? 'The effects may not be immediately measurable,' says Stewart. 'But it could lead to them developing a passion for art that makes a huge difference to their life.
I remember one young boy coming to a workshop; he'd never been to a gallery before. He loved it, kept coming back, and now, many years later, he's doing an A-level in art. Things linger.'
Instead of an immediate and easily measurable outcome from a visit, more long-term, sometimes very long-term outcomes and effects are increasingly being taken into consideration. Many gallery educators now believe it's not about learning a simple fact - such as Holbein painted many Henrys - that proves a visit has been worthwhile.
More appropriate measures might be memorability - how long did the impressions received and emotional responses felt at the gallery linger?
'You don't always know immediately how much it can transform someone,' says Stewart. 'The boy who went on to do A-level art - that absolutely knocked me out.'
Bukantas hopes Big Art at the Walker will be 'a national model of excellence' for very young children, which can be rolled out and used by other galleries. 'The minute you do something like this, you realise what other things need to be done,' she says. 'Big Art is getting people thinking - what can we provide for children? It's a catalyst.'
Dea Birkett is the founder of Kids in Museums www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
The small boy is visiting the Walker's new Big Art for Little Artists space, the first children's gallery in a national art gallery. The painting he now admires is Frederic Leighton's Perseus and Andromeda, not an obvious choice for a four-year-old Spiderman fanatic to focus on. But Big Art is designed for children just like him, the under eights, as an introduction to the wider collection.
His first 20 minutes were spent in the dedicated children's gallery, but for the next hour (and more, if he'd had his way), he wandered among heavy gilt-framed masterpieces, pointing, ogling, admiring and puppeteering.
Small children and high art aren't an easy mix. The Henri Rousseau exhibition at the Tate Modern may have attracted primary school pupils, but how could it fail with paintings of wide-eyed tigers in the jungle and dancing monkeys. But how do you get a toddler to be inspired by the dark moods of Rembrandt? Or explain Auerbach to a five year old?
Big Art at the Walker has risen to this challenge. At first sight, this dedicated space isn't dissimilar to a well-equipped nursery. But look more closely, and you can see objects sitting safely in glass cases, such as a pride of lion sculptures from the decorative arts collection.
In another corner, or 'zone', there are puppets and dressing up costumes copied from characters in the Walker's paintings. In a Silly Sums display case, there are ten jolly jugs, nine clunky keys, seven spiky forks, five bright bottles, three wise owls and two tiny teapots - all from the collection.
Labels are sparse. 'We didn't want too much text, so we came up with signs and symbols - a visual language,' says Ann Bukantas, the curator of fine art at the Walker. A footprint trail takes a child from Big Art to an object or painting with a magnifying glass symbol beside it.
'As much as we want children to use the Big Art space, we want them to go out into the gallery,' says Bukantas. 'We want to use it as a starting point to other things.'
A child can put on a Henry VIII costume in Big Art and stride out into the main galleries, following the footprints until they find Holbein's portrait and pose beside it. Puppets such as the boy with his hands behind his back from Yeame's And When Did You Last See Your Father? and, of course, the dragon from Leighton's Perseus and Andromeda.
In many ways, Big Art is nothing new, just bigger and better funded. (The Walker received grants totalling £500,000 from the JP Jacobs Charitable Trust and the DCMS/Wolfson Foundation Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, as well as a private donation.) Many of the activities rely on the old stalwarts of activity sheets, a jar of pencils and a rail of dressing up clothes. And these tried and tested methods of engaging young children with the old masters seem to work.
Not everywhere, however. Some still believe that mixing kids and high culture - never mind the crayons - can only lead to a big mess. The Frick Collection in New York doesn't admit children under ten as 'irreparable harm can be done to an artwork in an instant… by a careless hand. Even a fingerprint can cause permanent damage'.
Admitting children, it says, 'would necessitate erecting numerous and varied physical barriers… That action would change fundamentally the experience of viewing the collection'.
Bukantas admits that directing young children to works of art in the main galleries did raise security issues. But she was determined that this wouldn't lead to a series of new ropes being erected in front of them. Instead, vulnerable work has been treated or covered in ways that mean they are less likely to be damaged.
But it's more than security that the introduction and encouragement of young visitors threatens. The very atmosphere and feel of a high art gallery is challenged. A desire for stillness, contemplation and control in places considered culturally important often militates against including children.
According to Hilary Gresty, the director of the Visual Arts and Galleries Association, that's because small children appreciate art in an essentially different way to adults. 'Little children like roaming around between works of art; it's a very physical thing,' she says. 'Galleries don't accommodate these sorts of responses.'
Brian Stewart, the director of the Falmouth Art Gallery in Cornwall, puts it more directly. 'You have to let go of the idea that a gallery is a quiet place. You must welcome noise.'
The Falmouth Art Gallery, this year's winner of the Guardian's Family Friendly Museum Award, has a well-founded reputation for introducing very young children to high art. The gallery does not have any 'over-sevens only' signs, as no child is too young. Stewart tells the story of seeing a nine-month-old doing 'baby painting' - having its hand and feet dipped in colours and painting on paper - in the centre of the gallery.
'I went up to the mother and said: "I'm sure she's looking at that painting behind you. I'm sure she is,"' he recalls. 'You need to surround people of any age with quality and let them absorb it.'
Falmouth generates many of its own exhibitions, which enables young children to be included from the start. 'That's essential,' says Stewart. 'To have children built in from the beginning, not just as a few add on activities later.'
But other, often larger, museums and galleries have to make the best of inheriting an exhibition from elsewhere. Julia Kirby, the public programmes manager at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, was faced with the Toulouse-Lautrec poster exhibition arriving without any family element. Kirby fell back on family trails. She also created an informal area, decorated like a Parisian cafe with little round tables covered in checked table cloths in the exhibition space where children could copy Lautrec posters and design their own.
Like many larger museums, Birmingham suffers from rigid departmental divisions. When I commented on the height of the posters and the accessibility of text accompanying them in the Lautrec exhibition, Kirby replied: 'That's a curatorial area.' She does not trespass.
With fewer staff, and therefore fewer divisions, smaller institutions are often able to be more innovative and take risks. The Falmouth Art Gallery is always experimenting with ways of including and enthusing young children, often using its regular Saturday drop-in sessions to test new ideas on families. If these are successful, they might then be used in more formal workshops.
But it's not only about small children entering and looking, it's also about them owning an exhibition. 'Museums are owned by everybody, so every citizen - including young ones - has a right to them,' says Mark O'Neill, the head of arts and museums at Glasgow City Council.
The council was determined that such ownership was 'not just statements of abstract principal', so in April this year it introduced an entitlement for every primary school child in its authority to have one museum visit per year. 'In a sense, it's giving them what they have already,' he says. The council's aim is that even very young children will develop a 'visual literacy' to appreciate and interpret art.
According to Stewart, ownership goes even further than being entitled to visit galleries, it also includes being entitled to have work hung in them. At the Falmouth Art Gallery, works by children in response to exhibits are treated with the same respect as the exhibit itself - as if, in effect, they were also 'high art'.
'At school, a child does their work, they work very hard at it, and the teacher says, "Very good". Then it's put in a pile, and gets dog-eared and dumped at the end of the term,' says Stewart. 'Of course, I wouldn't frame rubbish from a poor workshop, which even the child didn't think was very good. But if they've put effort into it, the fact that somebody actually frames and maintains their work professionally and treats it as if it were a work from the National Gallery is the most transforming thing.'
It's a small step from including work by children alongside established masterpieces to letting the children themselves decide what counts as 'high art'. For many of its exhibitions, Falmouth has young people choosing the work.
'If nothing else, it saves a great deal of time,' says Stewart. 'You should see how quickly they make the decisions. Work is put before them, and they know immediately whether they like it or not. The whole thing's over in an hour. It would take adults days.'
But do very young children really understand or appreciate Picasso? 'The effects may not be immediately measurable,' says Stewart. 'But it could lead to them developing a passion for art that makes a huge difference to their life.
I remember one young boy coming to a workshop; he'd never been to a gallery before. He loved it, kept coming back, and now, many years later, he's doing an A-level in art. Things linger.'
Instead of an immediate and easily measurable outcome from a visit, more long-term, sometimes very long-term outcomes and effects are increasingly being taken into consideration. Many gallery educators now believe it's not about learning a simple fact - such as Holbein painted many Henrys - that proves a visit has been worthwhile.
More appropriate measures might be memorability - how long did the impressions received and emotional responses felt at the gallery linger?
'You don't always know immediately how much it can transform someone,' says Stewart. 'The boy who went on to do A-level art - that absolutely knocked me out.'
Bukantas hopes Big Art at the Walker will be 'a national model of excellence' for very young children, which can be rolled out and used by other galleries. 'The minute you do something like this, you realise what other things need to be done,' she says. 'Big Art is getting people thinking - what can we provide for children? It's a catalyst.'
Dea Birkett is the founder of Kids in Museums www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
