Children

The representation of childhood in antique prints reflects the shifting social and cultural understanding of children and their place in the world across three centuries of European history. The child of the seventeenth century — depicted in aristocratic portraiture as a miniature adult, in genre painting as a participant in adult domestic and social life, in religious imagery as the Christ child or the young saint — is a different figure from the sentimentalised child of the Victorian era, understood as innocent, vulnerable and in need of protection from the adult world. The prints that document these changing representations are invaluable evidence for the history of childhood as a social concept as well as objects of considerable visual interest.

Dutch and Flemish genre painting of the seventeenth century produced some of the most vivid depictions of childhood in the entire history of European art, and the prints made from these paintings circulated widely and established conventions for the representation of children at play, at school and in the domestic environment that influenced subsequent generations of illustrators. The children of Pieter de Hooch, Jan Steen and their contemporaries — playing with tops and hoops, learning their lessons, participating in family celebrations — are depicted with a warmth and specificity that makes these images compelling historical documents as well as aesthetically satisfying objects.

The eighteenth century brought a new philosophical understanding of childhood, associated above all with Rousseau’s Émile (1762), which argued that children were not merely imperfect adults but beings with their own developmental needs and natural goodness that society threatened to corrupt. This understanding had immediate consequences for the visual representation of childhood: the stiff formality of earlier portrait conventions gave way to images of children in natural settings, engaged in spontaneous play and free from the adult constraints that earlier imagery had imposed. The prints produced in this new mode — associating childhood with nature, innocence and the pastoral — established a visual vocabulary that persisted through the Romantic period and into the Victorian era.

Victorian sentimentality about childhood was both genuine and commercially productive. The illustrations of Kate Greenaway, Randolph Caldecott and Walter Crane, widely reproduced in print form, depicted an idealised world of well-dressed children in prettily imagined historical settings that expressed the Victorian middle class’s anxieties about childhood, innocence and the social changes that threatened both. These images are of considerable interest to collectors of illustrated children’s literature and Victorian decorative art as well as to those focused on the history of childhood.

Social reform illustration provided a darker counterpoint to the sentimentalised imagery of mainstream Victorian publishing. The street children, factory workers and orphans depicted in the illustrated press — by artists working in the tradition of documentary social commentary initiated by Hogarth and extended through the Victorian period — are represented with a specificity and urgency that served the purposes of reform advocacy while also functioning as vivid historical documents. These images are primary evidence for the conditions of working-class childhood in the industrial era.

For collectors of social history, the history of childhood, genre art or Victorian illustration, antique prints of children offer material of unusual emotional resonance and consistent historical interest. They document the changing place of children in European society with a vividness that no other source can match, and they connect the world of printmaking to some of the most significant social changes of the modern era.