VisuallyImpairedSavant Libre

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J . Child Psychol . Psychiat. Vol. 40, No. 7, pp. 1129–1139, 1999Cambridge University Press

1999 Association for Child Psychology and PsychiatryPrinted in Great Britain. All rights reserved

0021–963099 $15.000.00

A Visually Impaired Savant Artist: Interacting Perceptual and MemoryRepresentations

Beate Hermelin and Linda Pring with Michael Buhler, Sula Wolff, and Pamela HeatonUniversity of London, U.K.

In this single case study, paintings by a visually impaired and cognitively handicapped savantartist are evaluated. He paints his pictures exclusively from memory, either after havinglooked at a natural scene through binoculars, or after studying landscape photographs inbrochures, catalogues, and books. The paintings are compared with the models from whichthey were derived, and the resulting generative changes are accounted for by an interactionbetween impaired visual input and memory transformations.

Keywords: Autistic disorder, art, Idiot Savants, memory, visual handicap.

Introduction

The term ‘‘Idiot-Savants’’ was first used by LangdonDown in 1887 to describe the concurrence in someindividuals of low general cognitive functioning togetherwith an above-average specific ability. Such peopleappear to be able to use processing strategies within aparticular domain that seems to be independent of theirgeneral level of intelligence. For nearly 200 years suchsavants have been noted but in the past reports havemostly been in the form of descriptive case histories. In1983 O’Connor and Hermelinbegan a series of systematic

and controlled experimental studies with groups of musical, calculating, and artistic savants. SubsequentlyHermelin, Pring, and their colleagues have attempted toaccount for the marked frequency of individuals withautism in the savant population (Heaton, Hermelin, &Pring, 1998; Heaton, Pring, & Hermelin, in press;Heavey, Pring, & Hermelin, 1999; Pring, Hermelin, &Heavey, 1995).

In discussing the characteristics of the outstandinglygifted savant artist Stephen Wiltshire, Sacks (1995) posedthe question whether one could speak of a ‘‘distinctiveautistic art’’. He points to the concreteness, detailedperceptual accuracy, and to what he calls the ‘‘thisness’’in the drawings of this talented individual. He observes

that individual savant drawings also often show arepetitive preoccupation with particular themes, inStephen’s case with cars and buildings. In an assessmentof this savant’s progress in art school (Pring & Hermelin,1997) we have drawn attention to his exceptional abilityto depict space and distance in perspective. Such aremarkable focusing on perceptual details of a display

Requests for reprints to: Beate Hermelin, Psychology De-partment, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, NewCross, London, SE14 6NW, U.K.

and on their accurate rendering appears to reflect some of the characteristics that are regarded as typical for thosewith autism.

Another feature of many autistic savant artists is theiroutstanding visual memory. When we first met the then11-year-old Stephen Wiltshire, we took him to St PancrasStation, an intricate Victorian building. Stephen spent afew minutes walking around the station, and later drewan astonishingly accurate and detailed picture of it frommemory. Such domain-specific memory is also found insavant musicians (Hermelin, O’Connor, & Treffert, 1989;Miller, 1989 ; Sloboda, Hermelin, & O’Connor, 1985) and

calendrical calculators (Heavey et al., 1999).However, savant talent can also include other charac-

teristics than those of perceptual accuracy and memoryfor detail. It can extend to individual stylistic differencesas well as to transformations and variations of the initialinput. This has been demonstrated in the area of music(Hermelin, O’Connor, & Lee, 1987; Hermelin et al.,1989; Miller, 1989). It also is found in some calendricalcalculators who can not only name the day of a week inpast years, but also can do this with novel future years(Hermelin & O’Connor, 1986). We have shown that suchgenerative output is based on the extraction of rules andregularities intrinsic to the material which is relevant tothe savant’s specific talent (Heavey et al., 1999; Hermelin

& O’Connor, 1986; O’Connor & Hermelin, 1992). Theformation of such modular structural representationsseems to develop as continuous exposure graduallytransforms a knowledge of single instances into an event-related total system, governed by its own rules andregularities. An emphasis on distinctive, local processingis held to be characteristic of autistic cognition (Frith &Happe , 1994). For instance, absolute pitch is morefrequently found in musically naı ve autistic children thanin matched controls (Heaton et al., 1998). Thus a localprocessing bias, as well as the ability to integrate andtransform these individual elements into structural repre-sentations, may underpin savant talent. Transformations

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1130 B. HERMELIN et al.

and variations can occur within such structured globalrepresentations, thus allowing for generative output.

The savant artist whose paintings are assessed in thisstudy suffers not only from autism and mental handicapbut also from a severe, congenital, visual impairment.Thus his artistic ability appears to be either independentof these various handicaps, or alternatively is a conse-quence of their interacting effects on an inherent talent.

The Savant Artist

Richard was born in 1952 after a normal birth,although his mother had had glandular fever in the firsttrimester of pregnancy. His father reports that Richard

Figure 1. Landscape in Poland.

cried a lot from3 to6 months ofage. Whenaged 1 month,bilateral congenital cataract was diagnosed and con-genital heart disease was also noted. When 6 years old hedeveloped lymphosarcoma, which responded well to X-ray treatment. At age 18 he was diagnosed as havinginsulin-dependent diabetes, for which there is a familyhistory and which may have caused some additionalretinal damage. Consequently Richard is extremely my-

opic and his distance vision with glasses is now only 360and 460. He has also developed hypothyroidism andglaucoma, which, however, are well controlled withmedication.

Richard started to walk late and was extremely clumsyin the early years. From the late beginning of speech atage 6 he was markedly echolalic and this still persists.Pronouns are sometimes reversed, and he uses short



1131A VISUALLY IMPAIRED SAVANT ARTIST

sentences mostly consisting of nouns and verbs, whileleaving out linking words. He attended nursery schooland then an occupation centre for children with seriouslearning difficulties from 6 to 15 years of age. At age 11 hewas seen at the Department of Psychological Medicine,Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, and wasdiagnosed as suffering from mental handicap. His mentalage on the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale at this time

was 3 years 4 months. Recently we obtained a Verbal IQof 47 on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Scale and anonverbal IQ of 55 on the Raven’s Progressive Matrices.Richard obtained scale scores of 7 on the Block Designand Object Assembly subtests from the Weschler IQ testwhile his Vocabulary and Comprehension scores wererespectively 2 and 3. The first two scores fall within the16th top percentile and the two verbal tests fall re-spectively into the bottom 04th percentile and 10thpercentile. Such a discrepancy between these subtests is apattern typically obtained from those diagnoses asautistic (Happe , 1994).

Anecdotal reports of Richard’s early behaviour alsoare suggestive of the presence of autism. For example, his

father reports that he did not anticipate or respond tobeing picked up and accepted cuddling only passively.Later, when Dr Sula Wolff of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh observed him, shenoted that his behaviour was characterised by lack of involvement with classroom activities and an aimlesswandering around the classroom. He never played withtoys and showed no interest in age peers. Collaboratingwith us in the present investigation, Dr Wolff was able toconfirm her early impression of autism by assessingRichard as fulfilling the ICD criterion for the syndrome.Richard’s father’s responses to the Diagnostic Interviewfor Social and Communication Disorders (Wing &Gould, 1999) were also consistent with this diagnosis.

Richard began to draw when aged 4 and the drawingshe was producing between the ages of 6 and 7 years Selfe(1985) described as ‘‘striking’’. He has continued toproduce pictures throughout his life and currently paintsfor 2 to 3 hours most days. He relies solely on oil-basedcoloured crayons to produce his pictures on paper. Hedoes not enjoy looking at other artists’ paintings andhardly ever does so. Instead he goes to his local libraryand looks at landscape photographs in books andgeographic magazines, or at brochures at the local travelagency. He then goes home and after days, weeks, ormonths produces a picture from memory based on aphotograph he has previously studied. Sometimes he alsoderives his pictures from a natural setting at which he has

looked through his binoculars. Figure 1 represents such ascene, which he saw when travelling with his fatherthrough Poland and painted from memory after hisreturn home.

Richard has had many exhibitions all over the worldand his paintings sell so well that he earns his living as aprofessional artist. A trust fund has been set up from theproceeds of these sales in order to secure his financialfuture. He has travelled very widely, both to the openingsof shows of his works and for family holidays, usuallyaccompanied by his father. He has acquired knowledgeabout the flags, altitude, temperature, and local time of the many different parts of the world he has visited, and

in conversation he frequently makes reference to theseplaces. In addition to his interest in travel, Richard alsoenjoys listening to music. Like many other autistic savantsnot gifted for music but for art or calendrical calculation,Richard appears to have absolute pitch. The method todetermine this was based on an earlier study (Heaton etal., 1998) where recognition and memory for single toneswere initially paired with animal pictures in order to

provide pitch labels. In that experiment pitch identi-fication as well as pitch memory was found to be superiorin autistic children without specific high-level musicalabilities when compared to controls.

Thus we are dealing here with an individual with severeperceptual as well as cognitive impairments, who is alsodiagnosed as being autistic. From an early age he showedan interest in, and an outstandingly high-level ability for,producing pictures from memory.

Method

The method adopted here was to compare Richard’spaintings with the photographs from which they were derived,

in order to describe and evaluate some of the changes theseshowed when produced from memory. We are of course awareof the inherent methodological shortcomings that such aqualitative evaluation entails. Nevertheless, it is widely andalmost exclusively used to determine the outcome of examinations at art academies and colleges, and no alternativeobjective or quantifiable method for scoring pictures has as yetbeen devised. The present single case study must thus beregarded as a pilot project, which will serve to refine futureprocedures analogous to those used widely in the psychology of music. Although music appears to have a firmer, more specified‘‘grammatical’’ structure than seems to be the case for thevisual arts, dimensions such as veridity, composition, colour,and perspective drawing, as well as inventiveness, may beisolated and quantified in future investigations.

As for the study of Stephen Wiltshire’s progress in art school(Pring & Hermelin, 1997), the evaluation of Richard’s work wascarried out by our collaborator Michael Buhler, a painterhimself as well as a qualified art expert and an experiencedteacher at the Guilds of London Art School. He has never metRichard but was provided with copies of his pictures as well aswith the initial photographs on which these were based. Thesephotographs had been identified for us by Richard himself, andthus provided us with the opportunity for a direct comparison.One question we asked was whether a true artistic talent, heredefined as an inherent high-level ability for picture production,was evident. We also attempted to specify the transformationsin the perceptual andor memory schemata in regard tocompositional and structural features such as simplifications of form, omissions or additions of details, and changes in distanceand perspective. Special attention was paid to colour and light

rendering leading to changes of the overall ‘‘mood’’ conveyedby a painting in contrast to the original colour photograph.Such a mood transformation, as defined by Michael Buhler,signifies a personal intention of the individual painter throughthe object matter of a picture (Pring & Hermelin, 1997). It thuscontrasts ‘‘how’’ something is drawn or painted with ‘‘what’’the objects are that the picture represents.

Results

General Assessment

To the question of whether Richard’s paintings indi-cated a true artistic talent, here defined as an apparently




A.

B.

Figure 2 A and B. Mountains and Flowers.




B.

A.

Figure 3 A and B. Tropical Fish.




B.

A.

Figure 4 A and B. Mountain and Yellow Trees Reflected in Lake.




A.

B.

Figure 5 A and B. Standing Rock against Mountain and Sky.

inherent above-average ability to produce coloured visualrepresentations on paper, our art expert collaborator MBanswered with an unequivocal ‘‘yes’’. He observed thatRichard’s pictorial space, light, and colour were repre-sented in a nearly abstracted way, which resulted in thekind of metaphor that related him to the traditions of the‘‘sublime’’ in landscape painting. The paintings show ahappy positive view of the world and portray conven-

tional picturesque object matter. There is nothing threat-ening in his representations. Richard’s landscape scenesof snowy mountain peaks against blue skies, ripplinglakes, and meadows full of flowers were judged as verydifferent from much of the 18th and 19th centuryRomantic art that depicts the awesome grandeur andpower of nature. Richard focuses on light, colour, andspace, and can conjure up very subtle effects of atmos-



B.

A.

Figure 6 A and B. Lake View and Church.




pheric perspective, colour blending, and luminescence.There is less emphasis on pattern and he never becomesobsessionally involved with pattern making in the wayoften observed in the paintings of psychiatric patients.

In Richard’s work, colour tends to be intelligentlylimited to show a painting to its best advantage. He is wellaware that more colour need not make for better colour.Details are thus often suppressed, in order to allow colour

to function without interruption over a larger area. Hedoes not tend to do very large paintings, presumablybecause of his visual impairment. He works very closelyto the surface and the larger a painting is, the further backfrom it the artist needs to go in order to see it from aspectator’s visual viewpoint. When Richard’s memoryimage is not based on a photograph but on a naturalscene, he has looked at this through his binoculars andthis brings objects that are further away much nearer.This is reflected in his pictures, where distant itemsare brought forward, thus obtaining much greaterprominence than in the photographs.

Richard works with his eyes close to the surface. Hetends to paint in a very structured way, for instance by

starting to put a blue sky (i.e. the backdrop) over thewhole of the paper surface and then superimposing land,and on top of this, plants, trees, etc. If he wants to put ahouse on the land, he will paint the whole of the house,and then overpaint this partly, or sometimes evencompletely, with for instance the branches of the tree. Oilpastels, which he uses exclusively, have sufficient coveringpower to make this feasible. What is of interest, though,is that even using this medium, most artists would mapout all the objects to be depicted, and fill in the areas withthe roughly appropriate colours from the start. Butthough Richard’s method appears to have lacked anoverall plan, the result is nevertheless a coherent whole.

Models and Pictures

Mountains and Flowers. The picture shown in Fig. 2Awas painted from memory of the photograph in Fig. 2 B.It represents a much sunnier version of nature and isbrighter and more optimistic than the model. The sky isbluer, the light is sunnier, and the flowers are moreintensely yellow and have become larger and much moreprominent. They now dominate the foreground. There isa formal simplification of the snow on the mountaintopand a less oppressive rugged shape of the mountains. Theraising of the foreground also makes the mountains moredistant and less threatening. A house has been added andthe impression that the painting conveys has been

transformed from the rather sombre image of thephotograph into expressing a happy joyous mood.

Tropical Fish. As Fig. 3A shows, the plants in theforeground as well as the fish are considerably enlarged incomparison with the model (Fig. 3B). The fish and theplants have become a more effectively sized element in thecomposition, and there is an effect of light and shadow onthe colours that gives luminosity to the scene. There is agood effect of underwater atmospheric perspective, andboth in colour and composition the painting is moreclearly structured than the photograph. The white brightlight around the plants gives a good impression of reflected sunlight, which is not present in the model.

Mountain and Yellow Trees Reflected in a Lake. In thispainting (Fig. 4A) it is noticeable that the reflection of thetrees in the water, which is an important feature of thephotograph (Fig. 4B), has less emphasis in the painting.Instead, the artist has concentrated on the trees andbrightened their colour. He has also produced a verysubtle reflection of them on the right side of the lake. Thesnow on the mountaintop has undergone formalisation

into larger patterned shapes and the craggy details of therocky mountainside have been softened. Richard’s paint-ing generates an almost lyrical poetic mood, which is notpresent in the photograph.

Standing Rock against Mountain and Sky. There is asimplification in thepaintingof the rock in the foregroundas well as an omission of surface detail (Fig. 5A). Thisgives the rock a less realistic, more abstract appearance.Bright yellow flowers are introduced at the foreground toadd colour, but the small man to the left of the rock, whoserves in the photograph (Fig. 5B) to give the awesomescale, is omitted. This was probably because the man inthe photograph was too small for Richard to see. Themountain is dramatised in the painting by a darkening of

the rock face, and increased contrast is achieved bysimplifying the shape of snow against the detailed surfaceof the rock.

Lake View and Church. More license has been takenhere than in the other pictures. In this instance thephotograph has been simply taken as a starting point forRichard’s own composition. He has ignored the givenforeground completely and honed in on the church (Figs6A and 6B), for which he has invented his own onion-shaped dome. In his painting the church is now setagainst autumn trees. The mountains have approachedcloser and ducks have been introduced in the foreground.

Summarising the results of this assessment, Richard’smost outstanding artistic abilities lie in the depictions of

colour, light, and space. This is most apparent when he ismarkedly abstracting from his models, thereby producingsubtle effects of atmosphericperspective, colourblending,and luminosity. He simplifies shapes, enhances colours,and omits details, and through such means produces, if not strikingly original, nevertheless balanced, happy,harmonious pictorial representations.

Discussion

As far as we are aware, there has been up to now noreport of a pictorial artist who suffers not only frommarked cognitive developmental disabilities, but alsofrom a severe congenital impairment of visual perception.

To the puzzling question of why somebody born withsuch multiple handicaps should have shown from earlychildhood a preoccupation with and a gift for producingpictures, we can at present offer no definite answer.There seems to be, in this case, no obvious genetic or en-vironmental factors to account for such a predisposition.Richard not only has an inherent artistic talent but also adiagnosis of autism. Obsessive preoccupations and asmall repertoire of interests and activities are typical forautistic individuals, and might well have contributed tothe development of his artistic skill. Whatever his initialmotivation, his talent is not only functioning indepen-dently from his general cognitive ability and his autism,




but is also not reliant on a normally functioning visualinput system.

Neither a cognitive nor a visual impairment on its ownneeds to preclude artistic ability (Hermelin & O’Connor,1990; Trevor-Roper, 1997). For artists functioning on anormal cognitive level, any visual impairment tends tobecome apparent later in life, caused by either accident(Sacks, 1995) or the normal ageing process (Trevor-

Roper, 1997). But in some few instances imperfect visionin great artists also seems to have been present from anearly age. Cezanne, for instance, as reported by Trevor-Roper, seems always to have been myopic, a condition inwhich light from distant objects is focused before reachingthe retina, resulting in blurred images. Cezanne also haddiabetes, which may have led to some further retinaldamage. Trevor-Roper relates a comment made by acontemporary of Cezanne’s who stated ‘‘An incompletetalent with an imperfect vision resulted in works that werealways incomplete and sketchy ’’. In contrast, in anotherevaluation of Cezanne’s art it was concluded that he was‘‘an artist with a diseased retina who, exasperated by adefective vision, discovered the basis of a new art ’’.

Trevor-Roper cites a report stating that when Cezannewas offered spectacles to correct his myopia he remarkedafter looking through them ‘‘Take these vulgar thingsaway’’. He also relates a charming anecdote of Monet,who also was apparently myopic. When persuaded tolook through corrective glasses, he is reported to havesaid ‘‘My God, I see like Bouguereau’’ who was a veryacademic and conventionally naturalistic painter of theperiod. These reports confirm that sometimes an apparentdeficit can turn into an asset. It relieves an individualfrom direct precise visual input and by necessity gives himthe freedom to impose his own distorted image, thusgenerating his own representation of reality.

Richard, in common with other savant artists, has an

extremely good visual memory. This may lead, as forinstance in the case of Stephen Wiltshire (Pring &Hermelin, 1997), to astonishingly precise representationsof perceptual features such as spatial perspective and veryaccurate detail, while retaining a personal style in his linedrawings. Sacks (1995) remarks on the ‘‘ thisness’’ of Stephen’s drawings, on the emphasis on ‘‘ what ’’ is drawnrather than conveying the strong personal characteristicsof ‘‘ who’’ drew it. He suggests that there may be aconnection between savant artistic talent and autisticpeople’s remarkable capacity for minutely detailed ob-servation and representations, as well as repetitivenessand stereotypy. In spite of this, he is not certain that onecan speak of a distinctive ‘‘ autistic art ’’, and the pictures

of some other autistic savant artists, including Richard’s,suggest otherwise.

Our investigations of about 12 autistic artists stronglysuggest that there is no stereotyped ‘‘autistic art’’.Individual differences in style and subject matter rangefrom near abstracts, through sensitive subtle portraitureand Dali-like surrealistic pictures, to precise and detailedline drawings. These latter often demonstrate a superbsense of perspective and frequently have an astonishinglypersonal and dynamic quality of line.

Savant artists and equally gifted normal individualsalso share some cognitive processing characteristics. Bothgroups have good spatial abilities as well as better

recognition of hidden and incomplete figures than isfound in controls (Hermelin & O’Connor, 1986). Also,like artistically gifted children, autistic artists have verygood short- and long-term visual memory (Rosenblatt &Winner, 1988).

Richard’s work does not reflect precisely and in detailthe models from which it derives and, though hisintellectual limitations may lead him to adopt un-

controversial representations of a happy harmoniousworld free of emotional conflict and disturbance, theseare his own personal interpretations. The completepicture probably results from an interaction of unclearand imprecise vision, individual style, and the memorytransformations he performs on his original perceptions.Thus he adds and omits, changes size and prominence of some features, and transforms colour. To what extentthis generative process is contributed to by personalpreference, distorted vision, memory transformations or,most likely, by an interaction of these factors, is notcertain. How memory transformations can operate on anartist’s output is for instance illustrated by Sacks (1995)in an account of a man who, when painting, relied entirely

on his memory of his Italian childhood village. He hadleft his home village when he was 9 years old. Sacksdescribes these paintings as minutely accurate in per-ceptual detail yet, in spite of horrendous war experiences,expressing a strong personal mood of idyll and serenity.Memory, as Bartlett (1932) pointed out, is not a re-excitation of fixed traces, but is an imaginative, activereconstruction. Thus imaginative memory can reduce theinfluence of actual experience, substituting instead notonly perceptual but also mental transformations repre-sented in the memory schemata. Truly great artists, likeBonnard in the late 19th and early 20th century, fre-quently painted their pictures from such memory repre-sentations (Watkins, 1998).

We do not, of course, wish to imply here that a savantartist could ever transform and revolutionise previousartistic conventions, as did artists like Cezanne, orgenerate memory images as evocative as Bonnard’s.Though inherent specific talent appears to be to someextent independent of the level of general cognitivefunction and psychiatric diagnosis, such a talent only actsas a potential starting point. Its full realisation dependson the use that is made of it. It is a necessary but not asufficient condition for outstanding artistic achievement.True generative power is a function of having somethingto say, of finding new ways of saying it, and of acquiringand perfecting the necessarily technical skills to this end.Clearly, high levels of thought, depth of feeling, and as

yet undefinable personality characteristics are central tothis process. ‘‘ Idiot-Savants’’, by definition, are unlikelyto possess such qualities.

Idiot savants, and perhaps particularly those withautism, have no knowledge of or interest in past orcurrent art movements. In fact Richard actively dislikeslooking at pictures in art galleries. Savants also lack thecapacity or inclination to assess their own levels of achievement and set artistic goals for themselves. Theselimitations restrict their creative development.

Nevertheless, savants, including those with a diagnosisof autism, are not excluded from sharing with other giftedindividuals an ability to generate transformations and




variations of perceptual data and expression of a personalstyle. Through what Vigotsky (1939) has called the‘‘uniqueness of the nature of developmental intellectualimpairment’’ they may make their own special con-tribution and this may, in rare instances, result in a deficitgiving rise to an asset. In the present instance this‘‘uniqueness’’ lies in the interactions between cognitiveand perceptual handicaps, personal style, and a pre-

occupation with picture production. In Richard’spaintings these interacting factors have resulted inpictures that transform perceptual reality, thereby gen-erating a mood of harmony and serenity through theenhancement of colour, light, and atmospheric perspec-tive.

Acknowledgements— This research was supported by theNuffield Foundation (Grant reference: DIR05). We are verygrateful to Richard and Mr Wawro for their helpful supportand cooperation in this study.

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