Juvenile Troubles

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.