GETTING CHILDREN INTERESTED IN ART GALLERIES:
KATIE & THE SPANISH PRINCESS, JAMES MAYHEW, ORCHARD £10.99
LUCY MICKLETHWAIT, A CHILD’S BOOK OF COLOUR, FRANCES LINCOLN

Despite the National Galllery’s insistence that kids are only interested in Rousseau’s Tiger in a Storm, children can and do fall in love with high art as soon as they can understand a story. Titian’s Perseus diving headfirst into the sea to kill the monster, Uccello’s fabulous St George, Stubbs’s rearing Whistlejacket and Turner’s fiery Fighting Temeraire are all thrilling to infants of over 3. This month, exhibitions of both Velasquez and Holbein opened in London. Each is wonderful to take children of 10+ to see, as long as you bother to look at some books with them beforehand.

Holbein’s startlingly vivid portraits at Tate Britain will fascinate any student of the Tudors, but it is Velasquez at the National Gallery who may interest them more, thanks to an unsung hero of picture books. For 17 years, the author and painter James Mayhew has introduced nursery-age children of 3+ to works by Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Degas, Leonardo da Vinci and many more through the agency of his mischievous Katie. Katie has the magical gift of being able to enter famous paintings, causing havoc while Grandma snoozes. Mayhew’s lively pastiches are a lovely way to start a lifetime of enjoying art : if you want to know what made Mona Lisa laugh, ask Katie.

In Katie & the Spanish Princess, our heroine encounters Velasquez’s Portrait of the Infanta Margarita, a luminous blonde child in a stiff golden dress. The little girls become instant friends, and Katie swaps her own red coat and jeans for the Infanta’s royal costume. Enjoying the contrast, the two little girls visit Goya’s little boy with a magpie, and he, too comes alive. The magpie flies out, snatches a jewel from the Infanta’s dress, and is lost. As the children chase the naughty bird from painting to painting they chat to peasants by Murillo, before being told off by the Princess’s father, (Velasquez’s portrait of Philip lV) and returning to normality.

A number of children’s authors, from John Masefield to JK Rowling have imagined what it would be like if people in portraits could magically step out of or move about inside them. Posy Simmonds had a similar idea in the lovely ‘Lulu and the Flying Babies’ but failed to use real paintings, like Mayhew; I’d have liked the whole book to focus on Velasquez, but once you get the idea you could spin a story around the Infanta and the Dwarf, like Oscar Wilde. Older children of 9+ will get much more out of Elizabeth Borton de Trevino’s profoundly moving historical novel about Velasquez’s black slave, I Juan de Pareja; its absence in the exhibition shop is almost as sore a lack of child-friendly 100 piece jigsaws at the National Gallery itself.

For toddlers and nursery age children, Lucy Micklethwait’s A Child’s First Book of Art is an essential for any family planning on visiting art galleries. Supremely appealing, and spanning paintings from Oriental miniatures to Hockney, Micklethwait organises paintings by focussing on small details (animals, colours, faces, shapes, numbers) in a way that captivates infants. Shockingly, it’s out of print in the UK, though you can buy it through www.amazon.com; Frances Lincoln publish her First Book of Colour, along these lines. Culture is seen as elitist only because so few people bother to teach it in a way that is accessible. If my children were able to grasp the miracle of Velasquez’s fried eggs or the moral intelligence laying bare Holbein’s sitters over half-term, it’s because they had such simple, splendid books to prepare them. Far from being inaccessible, Old Masters are made for young minds.