IT WAS in Georgian England that the family began to define itself, for the first time, not so much as an economic unit but as a companionable group knit by bonds of affection. The child, for so long marginalised, moved to the heart of the home. The 18th century had “discovered” adolescence.
By 1763, Britain was emerging from war with the greatest empire that the world had seen since Rome. Everyone, from the loftiest aristocrat to the lowliest peasant, was to feel the effects. Society was accelerating rapidly forwards. It was reorganising itself in ways that now we can recognise to be modern.
The future industrial towns were starting to take shape. The population was soaring. And an expanding middle class was establishing itself. The dour Puritan ethic that had depressed Stuart England was replaced by a newfound delight in social pleasures. And this was nowhere more evident than in the domestic sphere.
It is this process of discovery that Pictures of Innocence, a show at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, explores. The exhibition — an expanded form of which was on display at Holburne Museum in Bath this year — now moves to the elegant 18th-century townhouse in Kendal built by Colonel George Wilson for his wife and new family.
George Romney’s lyrical 1776 depiction of The Gower Children, a star work in the gallery’s permanent collection, sets the scene perfectly. This ambitious portrait, in which the four rosy-cheeked scions of an aristocratic patron dance like the figures from some classical frieze come to life, presents an Arcadian vision of childish innocence and grace.
How different the vibrant, dark-eyed little Gowers appear from the young Garton Orme, whose portrait — painted 70 years earlier by Jonathan Richardson — opens this show. Young Garton, a supercilious paradigm of parental aspirations, poses at his spinet: a vestige of a more stilted era. He is a little stuffed frock-coat. No wonder, you might think as you meet his cold blue stare, that he grew up to be a squandering rake. No wonder that local rumours that he had disposed of his first wife down a well appeared to be ratified a century later when the unfortunate’s coffin turned out to contain nothing but stones.
Garton’s parents obviously weren’t familiar with the philosophies of John Locke, who had launched his ground-breaking debate on child rearing in 1693 with the publication of his Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Locke advocated the importance of play in development. A “gamesome humour” should be encouraged, he declared, not “curbed or restrained”. It was needed to keep up a young person’s spirits, to “improve their strength and health”.
Hogarth was probably the first British artist to respond. In 1730 he painted The House of Cards and The Tea Party — the first of his portrait groups to focus exclusively on children. For all their disturbing symbolic resonance they also celebrate the childish antics which, in his masterpiece The Cholmondeley Family, subvert mannered decorum and celebrate mischievous chaos.
Hogarth was extremely influential, even though his children look more like dwarfed adults — even the baby appears like some maiden aunt in miniature. By the middle of the century informal images of children at play were much in demand as parents sought to capture the charm of chubby innocence and to prove their sensitivity to enlightened new modes of thought. Gainsborough honed his skills using his daughters as models in his enchanting (but slightly morbid, especially in the light of their later unhappiness and mental instability) portrait of two girls tripping after a butterfly that alights, just as they reach for it, on a thistle.
Francis Cotes depicts the young Lewis Cage at the wicket just a few years after Rousseau’s Émile, first published in English in 1763, had advocated the advantages of simple outdoor pursuits. “Instead of keeping [the child] mewed up in a stuffy room,” he enjoined “take him out into the meadow”. Reynolds captures a sense of the dignity of childish absorption in his bewitching little 1788 portrait of Penelope Boothby. And his successor Thomas Lawrence paints the young Georgiana Fane as a semi-clad shepherdess, a child of nature, fresh-skinned and barefoot against a romanticised mountain backdrop.
Yet together these portraits present less a picture of the children’s inner world than the world of the family that encircled them. Allan Ramsay’s heartrending little oil sketch (found unstretched among his personal belongings after his death) of the face of his dead firstborn has a haunting intimacy. You can almost feel the grief-stricken painter stroking the soft baby locks across the temples, brushing a crooked finger over the curve of the cheek. This is a picture that speaks of paternal love.
And perhaps it was the father, in particular, who was released by this revolution in child portraiture. The remote progenitor now reveals a more human side of his nature. He can manifest his affection, as a 1750 picture by Pompeo Batoni shows. Batoni was famous for the putti, modelled on his own children, who populated his paintings. Thomas Barret and his wife had been on the Grand Tour for a year when they met him and showing him the miniature of Barbara, their daughter who had died of fever just days before their departure, they commissioned him to paint them as a family. The image is haunted by sorrow and tenderness.
Yet the paterfamilias is still not quite domesticated — at every appearance, it seems, he keeps a finger slipped in to the book he lays down, as though momentarily distracted by his family from loftier matters. But an unpretentious 1786 conversation piece by Henry Walton of Sir Robert and Lady Buxton with their daughter Anne, speaks of a new intimacy in family life, presenting the child as a bond linking the parents in a shared affection.
It is notable that childless artists tend to portray children best. It is Hogarth — a sympathetic and active supporter of the Foundling Hospital — who is most alert to their scampish energy. It is Reynolds who best captures their inner life. Perhaps this is because these unmarried men can relate to childhood as they remembered it for themselves and not see it through the veils of parental responsibility.
And yet, for all that Reynolds’s portrait of little Penelope was praised for its depiction of “the dawning traits of the youthful mind”, the mind that she shows is that of an adult in miniature. This bonneted tot could apparently read and speak several languages before she died at the age of six, breaking the heart of her father. She had a wisdom beyond her years, as her complex expression suggests.
Reynolds’s Boy Reading may at first seem unique in this show in that it presents a portrait of a boy seemingly locked in his own thoughts, oblivious to adult observation. But the model is a “net boy”, a pauper whose name Reynolds probably didn’t even know, but who was only too happy to come in from the cold and pose in the comfort of the studio for a few pennies. He certainly cannot read the book whose pages he turns.
These paintings are not so much about childhood as about adults’ views of childhood. Their sitters still remain adjuncts to the grown-ups. The Georgians may have “discovered” childhood, but they did not set it free. They studied it as it frolicked in its gilded cage of ideals.
- Pictures of Innocence: Children in 18th Century Portraiture is at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal (01539 722464), until October 8
PICK OF THE SUMMER SHOWS
Nelson and Napoleon
National Maritime Museum (020-8312 6608) until Nov 13
The two great military rivals meet at last in a show that sends tingles down the spine.
Gauguin’s Vision
Royal Scottish Academy (0131 6246200) until Oct 2
The astonishing vision of this great post-Impressionist is set in an illuminating contemporary context.
The Lake
Tingrith Fishery, Beds, 01525 74024 until Oct 2
Imagine what it feels like to feel like a fish in Julie Freeman’s Nesta-sponsored project.
Package Holiday
Baltic (0191 4781810) until Sept 4
Take a virtual holiday as Swiss artists Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg invite you to visit their interactive Alpine installation.
