and inward, “absorbed” expressions in portrait representations that seem much less explicitly to address
or impress the viewer than their antecedents in grand public portraiture. She stresses that the emphasis in
such portraiture on private, personal feeling or, as it was increasingly known, “sensibility,” was in fact a
fiction constructed by artists in order to counter what they saw as the even greater artifice of the codes of
gentility that had hitherto dominated the genre of portraiture. This fiction resonated from the 1760s
onwards with developments in literature and philosophy that associated the experience or outpouring of
emotion with personal virtue. Bonds of feeling and empathy made particularly good subject matter in this
context and often lay at the heart of what is now termed “sentimental(ist)” art; that is, art referring to
feeling or sentiment (Retford, 2006, 1–4). The broader ancestral relationships central to much earlier
formal portraiture became less interesting than more intimate gatherings of immediate family (Wrigley,
2007, 258).
Children were shown in more childlike dress, playing informally with animals and toys, as opposed to
earlier grand family portraits in which they had appeared to be as stiff and formally dressed as adults
were. Notions of childhood and adulthood are culturally and historically specific, and the eighteenth
century is often considered to mark a watershed in this respect. The “special” nature of children – their
fragility, unstable identities, uncertain morality ranging from innocence to cruelty, growing self
consciousness, changing physical form and emerging sexuality, were increasingly acknowledged,
particularly in the sphere of artistic representation (Kayser, 2003, 10, 14, 29, 119, 149–152; Scott, 2003,
97). This change generated a range of adult responses to children, from the relatively libertarian ideas on
education of John Locke, whose views were reinterpreted in the mideighteenth century by thinkers such
as JeanJacques Rousseau (1712–1778), to sterner, disciplinarian views characteristic, for example, of
the Weslyan Church.
Portraits of children became popular with both the aristocracy and with patrons from the middling to
wealthy ranks of society. They were exhibited in public a great deal from the 1770s. Even artists like
Reynolds, who constructed fairly formal classical family portraits, included in them playful, chubby, putti
like children who were meant to pull on viewers’ heartstrings. It has been suggested that such
representations could sometimes serve as a vehicle for the expression of crossgenerational desire
(Pointon, 1993, 5, 177–193), especially as child portraits were painted mainly for the delight of adults.
There is also some evidence that many “pretty” representations of children in other genres, such as the
rosycheeked figures featuring in cottage scenes by Gainsborough, hinted at notions of victimhood and
poverty that were more explicit when embedded in satirical images (Crown, 1984, 163–7). Some
“stiffer” representations of children persisted, for example, in the society portraits of Arthur Devis
(1712–1787), who used wooden lay figures as his models. His work declined in popularity from the
1760s, due to a growing taste for the “natural” (Figure 2.8).