January 2011

The genre painters of the last century favored pleasant, pretty, or humorous subjects, and even when they painted children misbehaving, the naughtiness was not very menacing. In fact, juvenile delinquency was endearing in the hands of these artists, for harsh realism was not the fashion, and painters produced what the public wanted to hang on its walls. On these pages the experimental children dissecting their mother’s watch as she dozes serenely, the embarrassed little pair who are late for school, and the impudent young ruffians thumbing their noses at the angry shopkeeper are about as far as the genre painters of the age cared to go in depicting youthful depravity.

If they should care to, the leaders of Women’s Liberation may add Miss Hannah Adams, born in 1755, to their roster of distinguished women. She was probably the first native American woman to earn a living as a professional writer.

Worthy soul though she was, Hannah nevertheless presents problems as a symbol of womanhood on the march. First of all, she had the unforgivable habit of calling herself “a mere woman.” One could predict that if she had been called upon to harangue a Women’s Lib rally, she would promptly have toppled over in a dead faint, for she was excessively shy and tongue-tied in the presence of strangers. Male chauvinist pigs would grunt with satisfaction when they read her description of her own books on history and religion as nothing more than compilations of facts gleaned from desultory and unconnected materials by an insufficiently educated woman.

City life was harsher for children than country life, and the genre painters of the ,time emphasized the point by painting bedraggled backgrounds to many city scenes—tattered posters behind the figures and litter underfoot. Suggestions of class and discrimination, petty vice and petty cruelty also appeared in paintings of children in the city, as in the pictures on this page. It is also interesting to observe that the faces of city children were often painted to seem sharper and less childlike, sometimes suggesting small, wizened adults.

“What a sacred office is that of the parent!” exclaimed an anonymous contributor to The Parent’s Magazine in December, 1840. By 1915, he went on, the population of the United States should reach 156,000,000, and “what an influence when [the parent] may mould the character ofthat distant day and ofthat multitudinous population! … What destiny temporal and eternal awaits it depends upon parents now upon the stage. … An individual is now something; he is known and felt, and claims his influence and importance; then individuality will almost be lost when the greatest man is only one in one hundred and fifty-six million! ”

While nineteenth-century parents were wrestling with complex considerations of their children’s souls and characters, nineteenth-century painters tended to coat the whole world of childhood in heavy layers of sentimentality. Beautiful, wholesome children stare out at us from excessively pretty portraits; engaging youngsters are shown in scenes of innocent play or appealing mischief. To the modern taste, these sentimental paintings often seem a bit sticky, and a great many of the artists who painted them have virtually been forgotten. Recently, however, a new spurt of enthusiasm for nineteenth-century painting has revived interest in many long-ignored pictures. A MERICAN H ERITAGE has here assembled a portfolio of children in the last century—city, country, rich, poor, Northern, Southern—sometimes romantic but all, we feel, quite irresistible.

However harsh a child’s life might really have been in nineteenth-century America, the literature and art of the time depicted childhood as a world of charming Pollyanas or captivating Tom Sawyers. And the parent-child or grandparent-child relationship was tenderly recorded in countless pictures, such as the ones on these pages. The artists undoubtedly softened the reality, but it is true that Americans have always been extraordinarily concerned with the details of their children’s upbringing. Perhaps the lack of a servant class in America added to the closeness between children and the relatives who nurtured them. Perhaps, also, the energetic, underpopulated young nation was particulary aware that its boys and girls were its most essential natural resource.

With drooping diapers, paper hats, and saucepan drums the politically precocious children above are celebrating the Union victory at Vicksburg during the Civil War. The picture, entitled War Spirit at Home, was painted by Lilly Martin Spencer in 1866. The southern scene opposite was painted after the war, in 1868, but it appears to depict ante-bellum days. One can practically hear the music and smell the magnolias in this romantic scene of a white child serenaded by black musicians. Entitled Old Kentucky Home, it was painted by John Whetten Ehninarer.

During the nineteenth century most Americans still lived in the most Americans still lived in the country, and children work considered necessary for their character, but in the endless routine of farming the labor of each pair of hands was genuinely needed. The genre painters of the time, however also recorded the country child’s play world— a large and appealing world of animals, woods, water, barns, fences, and trees.

On a cold Saturday in December, 1865, the 350 members of the New York Stock Exchange gave a party to celebrate moving into a new building on Broad Street, near the corner of Wall—the first home of their own. “One of the finest temples of Mammon extant,” the New York Times observed. Visitors poured through the spacious lower hall and up the wide stairs to enjoy refreshments in the high-ceilinged, black-walnut-panelled Board Room, whose acoustics had already been tested at a brief stock auction that morning. Among the decorations to be admired were two gilt-framed portraits that had been hung in places of honor—of John Ward and of Jacob Little, important figures in the Exchange’s recent past.