Marion Richardson Collection

Marion Richardson (1892-1946) was an influential art teacher and pioneer of the child art movement. Talented at art, she was encouraged to sit for a teacher-training scholarship at Birmingham Municipal School of Arts and Crafts.

She studied here from 1908 to 1912, obtaining an Art Class Teacher’s Certificate. In 1912, Marion became the art mistress at Dudley Girls High School, where she developed methods of teaching art that were far removed from the traditional emphasis on copying and technical skill. Instead, she aimed to arouse children’s visual awareness, to encourage self-expression and to enable pupils to evaluate their own work. Her pupils would sit with closed eyes, perhaps listening to a description, and waited for images to appear in ‘the mind’s eye’. This resulted in vibrant, colourful and expressive paintings, contrasting starkly with more traditional pencil drawings.  

Pictured right: An art class taught by Marion Richardson underway at an all girls school

The Marion Richardson Collection

The Marion Richardson Collection was held by the Richardson family until it was donated to the School of Art Education at Birmingham Polytechnic in 1973. When the School moved out of its premises in Priory Road, it was transferred to Birmingham City University Art and Design Archives. The Archive covers the whole span of Marion Richardson’s career and from her first teaching job at Dudley Girls High School to her teacher training and inspection work in London. It includes letters; her personal diaries for 1930-40; unpublished papers and lectures; examples of her writing cards; glass slides and photographs of classes, exhibitions and children’s artworks; reproductions of artworks; part of her personal library (which includes books, magazines and pamphlets on art history, art education, psychology and religion); press clippings about her career, including reviews of exhibitions of her pupils’ work; recent research on her methods by teachers in the 1980s and 1990s, and several thousand examples of children’s artworks and samples of handwriting.

Pictured right: A painting produced by one of Marion Richardson’s Students, early 20th Century.