Changing Images of Childhood

By Michiko Kakutani

Using paintings, Atlanta show traces evolving U.S. attitudes

"The easiest way of becoming acquainted with the rules of conduct and the prevailing manner of any people," wrote St. John de Crevecoeur in 1782 about his years in America, "is to examine what sort of education they give their children, how they treat them at home, and what they are taught." Among the most vivid documents tracing our evolving attitudes toward children are the works of American artists. Using their portraits as a kind of visual social history, Emory University Graduate Student Rosamund Humm organized a show called "Children in America," at Atlanta's High Museum of Art now through May 27. The show illustrates the changing images of childhood from colonial days to the present--a vision particularly apropos in this, the United Nations' International Year of the Child.

Seventeenth century artists depicted sober, stiff youngsters, dour in face, erect in posture, adult in demeanor. Life for a child in Puritan New England, after all, was a sobering proposition: one-half of all youngsters died before the age of ten, and those who survived were continually reminded that they had been born in sin and were doomed to hell if they did not submit to the commandments of parent and preacher. To adults, play was a manifestation of a depraved nature, and they tried to coerce their children into becoming models of rectitude. One dictum for raising properly passive Puritan offspring: "Once a day, take something from them." Children were hurried into adult responsibilities: by three, some were learning Latin; by 16, graduating from college.

Befitting their grownup role in society, children were dressed like miniature adults. And since all good Calvinists looked upon wealth as a sign that they were among God's elect, those clothes were frequently expensive, ornate garments in the latest European styles. In Jeremiah Theus' 1753 formal portrait of Ralph Izard, for instance, the young man wears an immaculate gentleman's outfit, complete with ruffled shirt and silver-trimmed tricorn hat. All of twelve years old, he is painted as lord of the manor, stiffly gesturing toward his property.

By the mid-18th century, Enlightenment notions of free will and human progress had begun to challenge harsh determinist doctrines. Americans had come to accept the theories of English Philosopher John Locke, who wrote widely on child rearing, speculating that children were not born depraved, but that the "souls of the newly born are just empty tablets afterwards to be filled in by observation and reasoning."

With this new optimism came a shift in child-rearing emphasis from church to home: increasingly, parents focused less on a child's eternal fate and more on his making it in this world. Paintings mirrored the change. Children began to look more like--well, children, and were depicted as members of affectionate families. In his portrait of The Strobel Children and Their Servant Boy (1813-14), John Wesley Jarvis shows a young boy tenderly holding his sister. Hers is an expression of contentment, his of protectiveness. Such depictions of sentimentality echoed the views of transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, who went beyond Locke's tabula rasa theory to proclaim that children were innately pure and good, corrupted only by an overbearing society. "Respect the child," wrote Emerson. "Be not too much his parent."

Society slowly accorded children their own activities. Such 19th century writers as Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens for the first time created a literature especially for younger readers. As parents began to regard play as a natural, even educational activity, toys began to appear on artists' canvases, and children were shown in more informal poses. William Sidney Mount portrayed the Brooks youngsters poised with their hoop; an unknown artist depicted the little Wilsons with their dog and rocking horse.

In A Child's Garden of Verses, published in 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to "innocent and honest children" who were "very little, and your bones are very brittle." His concept of childhood as a special, inviolable realm was reflected in the canvases of John Singer Sargent, Lydia Emmet and George Wesley Bellows. The girls they painted were radiant creatures, living in their own protected worlds.

Such idyllic images of childhood, however, were not limited to portraits commissioned by the wealthy. Charming street urchins and the newly freed blacks were the subjects of other romanticized portraits, such as Seymour Guy's Little Sweeper (circa 1887) and Winslow Homer's A Sunflower for Teacher (1875). Later the stark, sepia-toned photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine documented much harsher childhoods on the streets of New York and in the mills of Georgia.

In the past few decades, parents have grown more and more preoccupied with the special needs of their children. And now, thanks to technology, they can document with snapshots the minutiae of their children's lives as exhaustively as Gesell and Spock have traced their development. The exhibition includes a number of such photos as well as the highly realistic work of Painters John Koch and Robert Bechtle, who depict children in casual poses: sitting around the pool with their parents or standing by the family Chevrolet. Less self-conscious than the old portraits, they remain, nonetheless, stored glimpses of the children's hour.

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