City Scenarios

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.