Drawing from memoryin a major way

"In February 1987, the BBC aired a program on savant syndrome entitled The Foolish Wise Ones. One segment featured a then-twelve-year-old autistic boy, Stephen Wiltshire, drawing from memory on camera a remarkably accurate sketch of St. Pancras station, which he had visited for the first time only several hours before. As the camera recorded, he quickly and assuredly drew the elaborate and complicated building exactly as he had seen it with the clock hands set at precisely 11:20, the hour he had viewed them.

"There were hundreds of calls and letters to the BBC following that broadcast seeking a source to purchase originals of Stephen's astonishing work. That initial interest and then a sustained demand for the drawings led to the publication of an entire volume of his works entitled Drawings (J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, London, 1987)."

The page linked above features a video of the now-adult Wiltshire drawing a 5-1/2 meter panorama of Rome over the duration of three days, after one 45-minute helicopter ride above the city.

See also:

"Gilles Trehin is an autistic 28-year-old. Since the age of 12, he has been designing an imaginary city called Urville, named after the Dumont d'Urville, a French scientific base in Antarctica. He has created detailed historical, geographical, cultural and economic descriptions of the city, as well as an absolutely extraordinary set of drawings. His Guidebook to Urville will be published later this year."

Both profiles via Moon River