Our taste in fine art can develop from an early age say researchers who found babies as young as four months show artistic preferences.

Psychologists at the University of Sussex found that when shown landscapes by the Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, both babies and adults mostly favoured the same paintings.

Van Gogh’s Green Corn Stalks proved to be the most popular.

The Argus: Babies as young as four months have a taste in fine artBabies as young as four months have a taste in fine art (Image: PA)

The team at the university’s Sussex Baby Lab also discovered infants liked paintings that had more edges – such as those featuring leaves or branches – and curved lines.

In their findings, published in the Journal Of Vision, researchers said aspects of artistic preferences may be hardwired from an early age.

Philip McAdams, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex and lead author on the paper, said: “It was fascinating to find that babies respond to the basic building blocks of the paintings, such as edges and colours, and that these properties could explain large amounts of why babies look at, and adults like, particular artworks.

“Our findings show that babies’ visual systems and visual preferences are more sophisticated than commonly thought.”

For the study the researchers recruited 25 babies, aged four to eight months, and 25 adults.

The babies sat on their parents' laps while 40 pairs of images, featuring landscape paintings by Van Gogh, were shown on a tablet.

Adults were also shown the same paintings and asked which image in the pair they found to be more pleasant.

Recordings showed babies looked longer at the Van Gogh landscapes that adults also rated most pleasant.

These paintings featured high colour and lightness contrasts as well as lots of the colour green.

But researchers also found small differences in the artistic tastes between adults and babies.

For example, they found that infants preferred paintings that contained the most edges and curved lines.

Professor Anna Franklin, head of the Sussex Colour Group and founder of the Sussex Baby Lab and lead author on the paper, said: “Although newborn babies’ vision is very blurry, our findings demonstrate that by four months old, babies can see well enough to look longer at some paintings than others and can pay attention to many of the artistic details.”