Author's reply

I am grateful for the responses to my article from Clark & Crossfield and from Ibrahimi. In reply to both letters, I probably did not express myself clearly enough. I was not intending to re-express the old idea that there is any simple way in which one can infer an artist's ‘mental state’ from their painting. My article was intended to point to something rather different: that our aesthetic response to paintings occurs because we put ourselves into a relationship to them which is ‘as if’ the painting itself had a ‘mental state’. This is not at all the same as suggesting that what one is looking at in a painting is simply a reflection of the artist's mental state. The painting has a life of its own which is often unpredictable. As both sets of correspondents point out, the meaning made from looking at the painting is as much up to the observer as to the artist.

I did say in the article that I did not suggest a simple correspondence of form and artists' mental state, particularly in the art of adults; there are too many factors of culture, style and history that affect the formal choices that an artist makes. Thus, there can be passionate emotion in Renaissance painting as well as in expressionism, and interpretation needs to take into account the stylistic conventions within which the artist is working. With young children the situation may be a little different just because their artistic productions are so much more spontaneous and cultural style has not yet a very big influence (children's drawings are pretty much the same around the world and through history). My research findings on the way that young children's formal expression reflects their mental state does therefore seem to hold in a slightly different way than for adults.