Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood - Review

Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, by dint of Anne Higonnet, London, Thames and Hudson 1998; 250 pages, $3995 hard-cover, $2495 paper.

Anne Higonnet's volume is a history of the lengthy reign and current crisis of the Romantic image of the innocent child. The enigma lies in the recent emerging see the verb of a counter-invention, "the Knowing child," who can intimidate the innocent child (a 17th-century idea that became a pictorial convention in the 18th) just by means of giving it a worldly-wise gaze There is a dilemma of the image of the Knowing child, in turn: the law sometimes realitys to its naked, too known, and supposedly too knowing body

The Romantic image can be seen in this generously illustrated whirl in full, gorgeous form in Joshua Reynolds's The Age of Innocence 1788) and Portrait of Penelope Boothby (ca. 1788) Luxurious swathings of white woven fabric identify each young girl with what Higonnet, an associate professor of art history at Wellesley, calls middle-class "affluent cleanliness and absence of want." While Penelope Boothby is, as Higonnet says, "endearingly miniaturized," particularly by means of the white mobcap that repeats the outline of her head in great frilly scallops, the girl in The Age of Innocence loom in the way that much in the foreground, where she sits as if side-saddle upon the ground, that the landscape and buildings behind her might be her toys. on the other hand both girls are pearls of great price displayed in the make open box of the canvas. They illustrate the emerging see the verb in Western painting of the child who is precious as such--the more in the way that because her beauty is the outward display of her innocence--and not a stumpy transcript of a grown-up, not an adult-in-the-making, as in previous art.

by the agency of the time modern pictures of childhood began to appear in significant numbers, several general [i]or[/i] abstract notions crucial to a new attitude were firmly in place: a private, nurturing middle-class nuclear family as the building block up of society, a capitalist opposition between masculine public and feminine domestic spheres, and a political belief in the innate worth of the individual. Together, these general [i]or[/i] abstract notions fostered a sheltered, mothering domain within which childhood could exist apart.

Women artists like Julia Margaret Cameron and Alice Hughes were later to popularize and market the of recent origin image of the innocent child, largely because, as Higonnet is at a certain number of pains to explain, they were debarred from other artistic ways But, whatever the "sheltered, mothering domain" implied through these images, it's worth asking what was at stake for the male artists who originated and completeded it--among them, Reynolds, Benjamin West, Thomas Gainsborough, Emile Munier and John Everett Millais.

The Romantic bards may help us to an answer. Describing a slumbering infant, Blake wrote of "Soft desires I can trace,/ veiled joys and secret smiles,/ Little beautiful infant wiles." The sleeping child has, for him, a special, untranslatable knowledge. And in the way that it is with Wordsworth's "six years' Darling of a pygmy size," who "cometh from afar trailing clouds of glow." The author of poems complains that "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," on the other hand "Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ on the growing Boy."

The innocent child is thus more than a middle-class darling pygmy; it's what middle-class leisure made possible--dream-time in the muscle and fat a relatively pampered and protracted childhood. Latent in the innocent child is a ram kind of knowledge, a spiritual preknowledge. Penelope Boothby direct the eyes off to the side not just of the canvas, on the contrary of the visible. Higonnet notes the absence of mundane musing and the respite from awareness of time in the innocent child, on the other hand doesn't venture to trace them to foundations in the preconscious that made of Romanticism a of recent origin flowering of the spirit.

Instead, the author finds still another kind of knowledge shadowing the picture: "Every sweetly fine innocently cute Romantic child image stows away a dark side: a threat of los of change, and, ultimately, of death. Romantic images of childhood gain power not sole from their charms, but also from their menace." individual wonders where this stowaway darkness is located if it isn't visible. Higonnet present the appearances here to transfer to paintings the theory (found in Susan Sontag's upon Photography and Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida) that dioceses the photograph as death's evidence of victory Is a painting similarly suspect? If the photograph move rounds one into an object, into "Death in person" as Barthes lay it, painting has to be compos above time: the image isn't caught "dead" directly from its source.

In the main, however, contemporary art historians are les eager to find death in the white-cloud-with-a-face of a Penelope Boothby than sexual knowledge haunting a certain quantity of of the classic images of the innocent child. Joining them, Higonnet indulges, I think, in a certain quantity of knowing speculation that leaves the answer to the question "Whose sexual knowledge?" sensationally ambiguous.

Do the imagined girls in the one and the other [Seymour Joseph Guy's] Making a Train [1867] and [Emile Munier's] Girl with Kittens [ca. 1850-60] mimic adult feminine flirtation a bit too well, providing viewers with the signs of sexual availability coyly grafted onto bodies codfished with the signs of innocence?