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Changing Face of Childhood Times Literary Supplement review, Aug 24 & 31 2007

Short of Leg

By Lindsay Duguid

An early work by the twenty-one year old Thomas Lawrence, “The Children of Lord George Cavendish” (1790), was the inspiration behind this rewarding exhibition of portraits of children, which has come from the Städel Museum, in Frankfurt to the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The twenty-four works on display have been selected and arranged to illustrate the artistic progression that took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from stiff dynastic compositions to something approaching and evocation of childhood.

The social and political factors behind this change – which also informed the Royal Academy’s Citizens and Kings exhibition earlier this year – are set out in the accompanying catalogue , which has a generous selection of notable child portraits by artists from Titian to Hogarth to Runge. Scholarly essays, translated from the German, examine such things as the influence on upbringing of the writings of Locke and Rousseau, German pedagogy and landscape gardening, and adduce relevant genres such as the conversation piece and “fancy pictures”. In practice, however, the curators’ argument is easily and pleasantly read in the paintings. The proprietorial titles of the earlier works – “The Balbi Children”, “The Children of Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach”, “Two Children from the Family of the Counts Thomatis” – suggest the aristocratic display from which interest shifted to middle-class daily life. The choice of suitable posing costume also moves, swiftly, from starched ruffs, stiff brocade and gold thread to white frocks and sashes, down-slipping stockings and wind-ruffled curls. The paintings’ props tell the same story: pet choughs (a heraldic crow-like bird, believed to be particularly tameable), apples (signifying fertility) and roses (maternity) are replaced by cricket bats, kites and bows and arrows; pillars, busts and marble steps give place to a universally bosky background. Halfway through the exhibition, we grasp William Beechey’s daring in depicting a child on all fours, in his portrait of the four children of a London lawyer, “The Oddie Children” (1789), and are ready to engage with Henry Raeburn’s strapping, ruddy-cheeked adolescent boys, James and John Lee Allen, masters of their rustic bench, their stout stick, and of the picture. No longer placed in a formal landscape, they almost fill the canvas, their matching yellowish breeches painted with light and life.

Before it gets here, however, The Changing Face of Childhood gives a good idea of how often painters, even progressive ones, simply fail to show the whole child. Bodies are often of adult proportions: in George Romney’s seemingly naturalistic “Charteris Children” of 1777, the eldest boy, Lord George Wemyss, is oddly elongated; the infant Archduchess Maria Theresa, in a would-be relaxed painting by Moritz Michael Daffinger, has a finely detailed head on a stuffed-looking body, apparently made of muslin and lace and with an unchildish waistline. Master Francis Cotes, in Lewis Cage’s “The Young Cricketer” (1768), leans on a giant cricket bat. Portraits of children were at the lower end of the fashionable painter’s repertoire, and one imagines sittings could be tricky – restlessness and boredom presenting what the catalogue calls “an extraordinary artistic challenge”. Their contemporaries thought it worth noting that Joshua Reynolds and Lawrence took trouble with their sitters, talking to them, telling them stories and even romping with them in the studio.

The exhibition credits English painters with making the best use of the new vision of children as exemplifying freedom, vitality and natural beauty. The way those ideas became translated into a set of visual conventions is evident in the handful of works by Continental imitators, who borrowed the iconography of the outdoor setting, the unaccompanied child and the notion of educational play. They were not so ready to imitate the English “non-finito” technique, the rapidly sketched impressionism used by Gainsborough and Lawrence to convey movement and impermanence as well as closeness, and one gets the impression of ideas obediently followed rather than a spirit infused. The result is often lack of sympathy. It is sad to see Jens Juel’s “Running Boy” of 1802, so carefully finished and so nicely painted, setting off decorously to his Copenhagen school. Andrea Appiani employs a motif of intimacy, depicting his two children, Carlotta and Raffaelo, clasped in each other’s arms, but it is and elegant and unconvincing embrace. And young Irenaeus Cleophas Ogiński, in François-Xavier Fabre’s beautiful, melancholy study of 1820, is posed in the classical manner, legs crossed at the knee, one arm leaning negligently on a monument, in a way that contradicts the message of the hoop and bat at his feet.

Ideas of ownership and educability were hard to abandon, especially when they came in a fashionable form; such notions often seem to cloud the painter’s vision. The exceptions here are all the more precious. Reynold’s Miss Crewe is got up in a quaint cloak, bonnet and gloves, with a basket on her arm; nevertheless, she is clearly a strong personality, a sturdy, beaming, undainty child; and this painting also conveys, as surprisingly few works here do, the funniness of children, their implacable presence resisting adult ideals. Even in the embarrassingly stagey “Portrait of Sir Francis Ford’s Children Giving a Coin to a Beggar Boy” by Beechey (c1793), a picturesque fable on the theme of philanthropic education, there is a glimpse of something rebellious behind the rosy cheeks, bright eyes and informal dress; the well-scrubbed noble boy evinces a frank curiosity at the appearance of the pale, ragged, barefoot beggar only a little older than him, and his sister’s slight bossiness in handing over the coin at arm’s length threatens to break out from the stultifying conventions of the image.

The best portraits here are the most intimate and informal, those in which the unruly and the indecorous challenge the painter’s concept. Gainsborough’s attentive close-up study of his two daughters – an oil sketch by an admiring, perhaps slightly awed, father – is neither charming nor sweet. It acknowledges individual, separate lives, and seems to hint at the import of Rousseau’s bleak remark “We know nothing of childhood”. Lawrence, in his portrait of the two Calmady children, whose portrait he undertook for less than his usual fee, is clearly struck by the rude health of these two ordinary, unaristocratic beings: three-year-old Anne almost bursts out of the circular canvas, her tiny milk teeth, shining eyes and barely constrained little limbs catching the painter’s fancy as the focu of her elder sister Emily’s admiring but helpless attention. An earlier work by Lawrence, the ambitious, antic “Children of Ayscoghe Boucherett” (originally catalogues as the children of John Angerstein, painted in Paris in 1799), gives the velvet and muslin their due and places the eldest bo against a marble pillar, but this is a painting of real untody children, round of neck and short of leg, being themselves, lolling, playing, in a world of their own.

Hung in the last room, alongside the Raeburn, it makes a satisfying conclusion to the story the exhibition tells of naturalness achieved. The Frankfurt version of The Changing Face of Childhood, however, ended on a more troubling note with an 1849 portrait by Franz Xaver Winterhalter of two of Queen Victoria’s children wearing scaled-down Highland dress, still naturalistic but presaging the more sentimental and self-conscious images that lay ahead.
Originally posted at 2:08PM, 28 August 2007 PDT ( permalink )
Catherine Fraher edited this topic 11 months ago.