Studies of Children and a Young Centaur

The immediacy of drawing is demonstrated in this charming and lively group of studies of children, executed with broad, assured strokes of red chalk, smudged by hand in places. Charles Hazelwood Shannon seems to invent freely on the page before the viewer's eye, depicting a group of teetering toddlers in various imaginative and challenging poses - - one shown from behind reaching up, two wrestling in daring foreshortening on the ground. Shannon also sketched a fantastical infant-like centaur, who turns and just begins to rear up, rather timidly, towards the spectator.