Monday 20 February 2006

Tell me about this picture

For a little side project: tell me your thoughts about this painting. It would really help.

23 comments:

Mindy said...

Well obviously the artist had a lot of brown paint left over and needed to use it up before ordering a new pack of paints.

Kirsty said...

Little Lord Fauntleroy?

Kerryn Goldsworthy said...

Erm -- did you want first impressions?

18th century English? Maybe very early 19thC? It looks like a very good contemporary illustration of Jane Austen. (Aha, is that what this is about?) One of Mary's children in *Persuasion* maybe.

Maybe later 18thC? Maybe Gainsborough? The browned-out shadowy exterior looks like him.

If it's Gainsborough then it's maybe one of his 'rural children' paintings rather than a portrait of the aristocracy's children -- note absence of strangulating satin clothing, and relatively natural hairdo.

I think this is a beautiful painting, actually.

R.H. said...

I think it's Gainsborough. I don't know. I shouldn't know.

Greetings, there will be no endearments.
Well maybe just one.

Dear Laura, the smelly posters arrived today.
I was out the front, and the postman handed me the tube, with a dirty look.
I'm joking, I just made that up.

I'm so pleased to get these posters. It's the highlight of my career. The real pay-off, of being a blog reply person.

So thanks Laura, and the posters are marvellous, better than I expected.
I notice it cost you 6.20 in stamps. And I sent you only 6.00. That's funny. Because owing someone like you twenty cents is so EMPOWERING.

Well I have to joke, I can't help it. And I'm truly sorry when people don't like it (the dirty dogs).

This isn't a joke. But it amuses me, in an astonished sort of way. Today I was heading to the supermarket, and there was a beautiful blonde girl coming the other way. I slowed down, and was glad when she didn't go in, because she was so beautiful, I would have had to follow her about for a while. For a thorough viewing.
That's funny, but it's not a joke. It's the truth, and people may as well know it.
It's shocking. Yes. And I'm appalled.

Good luck Miss Laura. You know I'd say that. But I just hope you know I'd mean it. Your blog is so very good. So very interesting. And you are funny. -Almost extraordinary; but not quite. No, not insane.
Not enough.
If you were you'd be even funnier.
And flat broke all the time.

R.H.

Zoe said...

I think he looks startled, and sad. Someone's just said something to him that he didn't quite understand, except to know he doesn't like it.

Unless of course Mindy is right.

ThirdCat said...

he knows a lot. reminds me of a few people in my family. and i reckon he would do a good line in chuckles when he is in happy moods. gorgeous fingers. bit much brown. the way his shirt opens is a bit more 70's (1970's that is) than one would expect

and is that bazcat in the left hand corner of the photo with a galah? because if it is i just won bazlotto again

lucy tartan said...

The painting is by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Thank you for your thoughts, they're very helpful. Please, keep them coming; there's no trick & it's not a test. Free-associate away.

RH I am glad your posters arrived safe and sound and I'm also glad you did not follow the blonde lady around.

ThirdCat, unfortunately there is no skerrick of Baz in the picture of the galah. If there was, you would be suspected of cheating. I look at this page at least once a day and only win the slot machine maybe one time in thirty.

Anonymous said...

A hauntingly beautiful image. The era is irrelevant, as his expression is timeless, that of a little boy (6 or 7 year old?) seemingly on the verge of tears, for whatever reason. Having seen the same expression on my own little boy's face, for me it stirs a strong mothering/nurturing/ protective urge.
It's a lovely painting.

Emily

Fluffy said...

You're this close to me posting my entire 3rd year dissertation on Youth in art from the Renaissance to today. As a comment.

*hangs head in shame*

Scrivener said...

I don't even think he looks all that sad, more like intent. Is there a kind of dichotomy going on behind him? Over his right shoulder there's the glimpse of trees and blue sky, but over his left? Is that simply a massive tree trunk behind him? Are there some sort of odd designs in the browness up there?

Anonymous said...

I think he looks dishevelled, and just a little bit poor; his shirt shouldn't be open so far (where's the chest hair and gold bling?) and his jacket is a tad too small for him - but maybe he doesn't have another. Someone at least button him up properly, wouldya? But his hair is so shiny and neat in such an endearing way, that you can see there been some motherly pride beamed down on him at some point. As for his expression, it looks like one of... wonderment? Slightly startled? All he needs is a dirty smudge on the cheek, and he'd be a regular Oliver Twist. Wandering through big bad London, never rude, always polite, and always just a little bit flustered as to what he's doing there.

Laura, my posters came yesterday too. Thanks a million - you rock da house.

R.H. said...

Laura, have a look at Middle Child's blog; the photo of the old couple.

ThirdCat said...

drats re bazcat, but never mind i'm sure i will suffer worse disappointments. i only ever cheat in a family context. and even then, i have to admit it.

also, i reckon this is the child the whole family is always saying 'he really is gorgeous' about

Phantom Scribbler said...

My extremely unhelpful response is that I'm a little freaked out at how much he looks like my kid.

I'm with Scrivener in being confused by the background, though. What IS that brown in the upper right corner?

Anonymous said...

To me he appears like he's been called in from running around outside to sit down and have his portrait done. His expression seems as though he's about to ask a question (a serios one too) of the painter.

The coat looks like it's something his mum made him wear.

The rosy cheeks to me make him look healthy and active, and he's not skinny so I don't think he's too poor.

ThirdCat said...

i know this is off-topic, and i don't want to sound like i'm obsessed with winning more bazlotto than anyone else or anything, and it's not like i feel that i need to defend myself against potential cheating claims...but i was pushing my little boy home this afternoon (in his pusher, i wasn't trying to hurry him in an un-nurturing way) and i remembered something from the statistics in year eleven maths (something of an achievement). statistically, just because you've won once, doesn't mean you've got any less chance of winning again. or, to put it another way: if you go back in the draw, you've got just as much chance of winning as anyone else

i promise not to ruin all your threads with unecessary self-references

R.H. said...

All my self-references are necessary.


And will continue.

R.H. said...

You seem a nice person.

My goodness yes.


When I win bazlotto.........

I'll give you half.

jo(e) said...

I think the background is deliberately dark and blurry so that we focus on the boy -- I think the background is supposed to be somewhat "natural" but in a blurry indistinct way.

He is staring intently. The way his hands are, it looks like he is holding himself still. Someone else has buttoned his coat for him -- you get the idea he will unbutton it the minute he stands up.

I think the artist wants us to notice the beautiful eyes. And the rosy cheeks mean he is healthy. The pale skin on his chest shows his vulnerability -- he is young, after all.

I like how his hair sort of blends into the background. He is in earth tones.

You get the idea that he has been told to sit still but he would rather be running around.

Just Like A Woman said...

It IS possible........I just won bazlotto!! What an adorable puss he is too.

Emily

lucy tartan said...

Congtatulations, Emily! I hope you'll enjoy your prize: a warm inner glow. (Not transferable & not redeemable for cash.)

Ampersand Duck said...

I think that this boy was so vivacious that he wouldn't sit still until the artist told him an entertaining story, which fixed his attention.

(tee hee)

Fluffy said...

You asked for it :o) just don't get all correcty with the red pen.


The Child in Portraiture:
The evolution of child figuration from the 15th to 20th Centuries





The concept of “the child” is not a static one. The way in which children are understood and portrayed has evolved over the centuries in accordance with widely held beliefs about what a child is and how best to encourage its development, and also as a reflection of the spirit of the times. Notably, the “Age of Enlightenment” saw the birth of the western concept of the ideal and innocent childhood as expressed in literature by Wordsworth, and in philosophy by Rousseau. At the end of the twentieth century, there is evidence to suggest we are indulging in a new fantasy of the child based on decadence and decay: eighteenth century sentimentality gone utterly rancid. In this paper I aim to discuss western representations of youth from the Renaissance until the present day, with particular emphasis on eighteenth century romanticisation of childhood.


It may be necessary as a precursor to identify that in art which is not a child. Cherubim and cupids are not children. Cherubim are of the celestial order of angels, often represented as beautiful winged infants. Ezekiel's fantastic and detailed descriptions of the cherubim are largely responsible for their entry into the history of art. Seraphim, mentioned only in Isaiah 6, are similar creatures. Cupids, quite the reverse of cherubs, are embodiments of Eros; pagan God of physical love. Cupid, often associated with Chaos, shoots arrows which inspire mortals and gods alike to acts of love. Cupids in art before the eighteenth century witness or even incite bodily acts quite the opposite of what we might today consider to be innocent or even playful. In Titian’s Rape of Europa, cupids frolic happily as Zeus, in the guise of a bull, makes away with Europa in order to rape her. Similarly, the Christ Child is not to be seen as a child as such. Christ when represented as a child or infant is representative of the Christian God, fully cognisant of His divine fate.


The Renaissance Child

Not content to merely repeat the achievements of his medieval predecessors, Donatello sought to breathe life into traditional figurative forms via a determined observation of nature. For this reason, Donatello’s bronze David distinguishes itself from known classical prototypes. Rather than a conventional nude studiously copied from the ancient models, Donatello presents us with a naked boy in the guise of a biblical hero. Furthermore, David is cast in the round so that the viewer may see the figure as they would a real person. The sum effect of Donatello’s innovations was that of a new kind of relationship between art object and viewer. The naturalistic mien facilitates a familiarity and an identification with the figure, ergo, with the biblical hero, David. This was an art made for the guidance and improvement of young men, who were to see themselves reflected in the smooth contours and soft musculature of the young king.

Representations of physically and spiritually idealised young men abound in this era. Pollaiuolo’s St. Sebastian (1475) depicts Sebastian stoically bearing the torment of his oppressors, resisting the urge to even cry out as the arrows pierce his flesh. Medieval and trecento images of Sebastian present him as a mature, bearded man, but in the quattrocento he is transformed into a handsome youth. Through his use of a triangular composition Pollaiuolo draws our gaze unmistakably to Sebastian’s genitalia. No matter where else we look, we are directed back, through the arrows, through the rearing horses, through the architecture; even perspective itself conspires against us. Like the Donatello, Pollaiuolo uses painting as a means of propaganda. By constructing a moralistic model for young men, he effects a form of social control over the wayward and pampered youths who created chaos in Florence’s elegant public places.

Contrasted against the symmetrical solidity of the father, the son in Ghirlandaio’s double portrait, Portrait of Franco Sassetti and His Son ca. 1485, is a scarcely more than an apparition. The father denies himself the pleasures of family life in order to be successful so that he might have a legacy to pass onto his son - the legacy represented by the land and buildings in the background. The son is a picture of devotion and insipidity. He serves his purpose well as a compositional tool, used to bolster the importance of his father.

The Romantic Child

Anne Higonnet in her book Pictures of Innocence dates the modern, western concept of an ideally innocent childhood to somewhere around the seventeenth century. Until then, states the author, children had been understood as faulty small adults, in need of correction and discipline. This not to say that throughout history parents have not loved their children. Phillipe Aris, in his book Centuries of Childhood puts forth that one of the possible explanations for a perceived distance between children and adults was a high infant mortality rate. Statistically speaking, in the years 1650 to 1750, 265 children of every thousand would die before the age of 9 , making it inadvisable to become too emotionally attached to a young child.

Anthony Van Dyck’s 1635 portrait of George and Francis Villiers is a good example of a pre-romantic vision of childhood. The pair are posed and dressed as adults in stiff lace and gleaming red satin. The serious expressions and confident masculine stance speak more of the adults they will become rather than the children they are. Their toes point outwards to encompass the world and the titles they will inherit: the Lord Francis defers to his brother, the Second Duke of Buckingham, George.

Reynold’s The Age of Innocence, in contrast, has absolutely nothing to do with adult life. The child is depicted for her own sake with no allusions to family, position in society, past or future. She is idealised - she communes with nature but her bare feet and dress are clean. Reynolds painted The Age of Innocence late in his career, after retiring from the Royal Academy which he had founded in 1768. Reynolds had in fact had such an exceptionally successful career that on retirement he could paint whatever he chose - and he chose to paint children. Reynolds amused his child models, who were picked from the droves of London beggar children, with fairy tales and magic tricks; quite the opposite of rival portraitist John Hoppner who had his wife whip children to keep them still. Reynold’s assistant James Northcote recalled: “He delighted much in marking the dawning traits of the youthful mind, and the actions and bodily movements even of infants; and it was by these means that he acquired the ability which enabled him to portray children with such exquisite happiness, truth and variety” .

Many factors converge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to create a new appreciation of childhood. Among them, the rise of the middle class nuclear family, an opposition between public and domestic spheres, and a political belief in the worth of the individual fostered a sheltering domain within which childhood could exist apart. The theories of French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau were hugely influential in defining childhood: his novel Emile (1762) puts forth “…an incontestable maxim that the first promptings of nature are always right. There is no original corruption in the human heart: there is not a single vice to be found there of which one could not say how and by what means it entered.”

Rousseau’s Emile shows the influence of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). Locke regarded the mind of a person at birth as a “tabula rasa”, a blank slate upon which experience is imprinted. While Rousseau officially opposed Locke’s belief in the empirical nature of learning, it is doubtful that Emile could have been written at all without Locke’s vision having come first. The sentiment which grows out of Rousseau’s vision of childhood is not based on a contrast between man’s fallen nature and his original innocence or on the bittersweet expectation of universal dissolution. It is based on the “feeling of life”. For Rousseau, the innocence usually associated with the lost Eden is integrally part of every child.

Wordworth’s poetry exemplifies this ideal; his love of nature very much in keeping with Rousseau’s vision of the child as naturally innocent. In 1799, Wordsworth wrote:

Oh, many a time have I, a five years’ child,
In a small mill-race severed from his stream,
Made one long bathing of a summer’s day;
Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again
Alternate, all a summer’s day, or scoured
The sandy fields, leaping through flowery groves
Of yellow ragwort; or when rock and hill,
The woods, and distant Skiddaw’s lofty height,
Were bronzed with deepest radiance, stood alone
Beneath the sky, as if I had been born
On Indian plains, and from my mother’s hut
Had run abroad in wantonness, to sport,
A naked savage, in the thunder shower.

Here exists a conjunction between the “innocence of youth” and the notion of “the noble savage”, a concept also developed by Rousseau and guided by the same conviction in an inherent truth in nature. The child, as the savage, is unconscious of the sins and follies of civilisation as both are absorbed by a natural state. Higonnet identifies this state as hermetic: According to Romantic pictures of children, innocence must be an edenic state from which adults fall, never to return. Nor can Romantic children know adults; they are by definition unconscious of adult desires . The gaze of the Reynolds children rarely confront the viewer, rather they look away as though completely immersed in the innocent thoughts and dreams of childhood. Reynolds’ wistful Penelope Boothby, eternally gazing in a state of sinless reverie, never connects with the viewer’s adult world.

The audience for this type of art was soon to become the most influential factor in its production. Particularly from the mid-eighteenth century there is evidence, in letters and works of art, to attest to the keen interest parents took in the development of their children. Disciples of Rousseau took up a near fanatical preoccupation in their child’s every movement, as evidenced by a letter from Frances Boscawen to her husband in 1747 in which she compares her son with her brother-in-law’s daughter:

What a difference! In every circumstance, and in nothing more than behaviour. She would not come near me, and is as far from an agreeable child as she is from a pretty one. Ours is both, in the highest degree, and so everybody thinks .

Increasingly, such parents commissioned portraits from artists skilled in depicting their child in a flattering light. Few were so skilled as Reynolds. In The Children of Edward Holden Cruttenden with an Indian Ayah, an Indian maid serves to establish a relationship of power and servitude where the children depicted alone might seem without authority . Often a child will be depicted with a devoted dog for the same effect.

William Hogarth’s charming portrait of The Graham Children demonstrates an observation of the behaviour of children whilst incorporating symbols which satisfy Hogarth’s penchant for narrative. The eldest girl holds cherries emblematic of future passions, while her infant brother looks on. He sits directly below a clock bearing a tiny cupid with a scythe, which the artist may have included when the boy died before the painting’s completion . The theatricality of the relationship between the boy on the right and the cat and caged bird is evidenced by the red curtain: the boy delightedly thinks that his music box is responsible for the bird’s song, but the viewer knows it is more likely that the bird sees the cat and sings out in alarm. Hogarth’s painting highlights the fragility of childhood as well as delighting in it.

The popularity of paintings such as Hogarth’s and Reynold’s, not to mention those by Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Henry Raeburn, Thomas Banks, Thomas Lawrence and Thomas Gainsborough, grew to encompass not only the newly moneyed but also the lower classes who now had the opportunity to acquire the images as prints. Although still in its early days, the practise of lithography was becoming widespread at this time. Reynolds himself had mezzotints made of his own paintings in order to take advantage of this new market . The child portrait became even more idealised as specific children were replaced with ‘every mothers child’; an amalgamation of the most ‘adorable’ traits possible.

Well respected artists such as John Everett Millais, who was also an elected president of the Royal Academy, produced what we now think of as intolerably cliched images of children cuddling kittens, or, in the case of Bubbles (1886), blowing bubbles. Of course, the reason we think of these pictures as hackneyed is that they were immensely popular; especially within the domestic sphere. In fact, the demand for pictures such as Bubbles far outstripped the supply. Millais produced adaptations of Reynolds 18th century child portraits of Penelope Boothby (Millais’ version titled “Cherry Ripe”) and the Age of Innocence, as well as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, taking advantage of the sentimentality surrounding pictures which not only held the enduring appeal of youth but now enjoyed the respectability and nostalgia of a bygone era. The Pears Soap Company bought the reproduction rights for both Bubbles and Cherry Ripe soon after they were painted and use the images to this day for nostalgic effect.

What had been merely a subject before was now also a style . Millais’ prototype of the adorable child was in turn faithfully reproduced to be used in childrens’ books and advertising. Women illustrators such as Kate Greenaway (who attended the Slade School of Art at Oxford and was personally encouraged by its first professor, John Ruskin), made simple, cheery drawings of children which became so utterly ubiquitous that one rarely questions their origins. Women were in fact encouraged to make this kind of art, not only because it dealt with the domestic subjects of childhood and maternity, but also because its commerciality had brought it into the realm of ‘low’ art. A comparison may be made with the contemporary photographer Anne Geddes.

Anticipating a logical extension of Rousseau’s thinking, Baudelaire declared: “genius is nothing more or less than childhood regained at will - a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis” . Picasso never made such “adult” work as when he was a child. Once when he was being shown around an exhibition of children’s drawings he remarked: “When I was the age of these children I could draw like Raphael. It took me many years to learn how to draw like these children” . The idea of an innocence to the eye, the suppression of what we logically know of the world, is still common currency in art classes today. Picasso, Jean Dubuffet and Miro among many others collected children’s drawings and sometimes showed them alongside their own. Miro, in a sentiment which mirrors that of Picasso’s, states: “The older I get and the more I master the medium, the more I return to my earliest experiences. I think that at the end of my life I will recover all the force of my childhood.” The resurgence of innocence as a theme came with Freud, but in this incarnation the innocence is not a thing apart. Innocence, as objectivity, was a faculty available to adults who could unlock the child within.


The Apocalyptic Child

The return to the child as subject has been a more recent occurrence, and one which presents problems for both the artist and viewer. The catalogue for a recent exhibition entitled “Presumed Innocence” (Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati) identifies a collapsing of polarities established by the romantic child model: the qualities of sophistication, artifice, decadence and evil are projected onto children who have been understood for more than two centuries as embodiments of innocence, purity and hope, in order to undermine those presumptions and expose them as cultural constructs. In a time altogether more cynical than that of Rousseau, we are ultimately unsatisfied with the saccharine fantasy of perfect childhood, when we know childhood to be a more troublesome affair laced with painful discoveries and violent outbursts.

Tracey Moffat’s Scarred for Life series depicts children suffering an abuse (of sorts) at the hands of societal stereotyping. Moffat uses the Life magazine documentary format ironically to “validate” her investigations into painful formative experience.

Inez Van Lamsweerde poses an androgynous prepubescent child as siren and rock star in her photographs Floortje Kick Ass and Kirsten. Lamsweerde disrupts our acceptance of the cliché via an overt eroticisation of the young model, forcing a realisation of exploitative commodification and projection of adult desires onto the youthful body.

Brothers Dinos and Jake Chapman’s work also uses shock value: the nightmarish Zygotic Acceleration; Biogenetic De-sublimated Libidinal Model (enlarged x1000) (1995) is about as far removed from Reynold’s Penelope Boothby as one dares imagine. The Chapman brothers explore the themes of genetic experimentation and mutilation in their mannequin-like sculptures. As in Lamsweerde photographs, the horrific sculptures make manifest the imposition of adult desires upon the child’s body.

Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids documents a 24 hour period in the lives of a group of sexually aggressive New York teenagers. In what can only be described as an orgy of self-annihilation, the movie’s young protagonists fill their day with sex, drugs and violence. They want their days to be interesting, but because they lack (for want of a better term) a ‘moral compass’, their definition of "interesting" is often lurid and self-defeating. The film’s final line mirrors our own horrified reaction: "Jesus Christ, what happened?"

What happened indeed. From the romantic vision of the child as the very embodiment of love and human potential, to the spawning of the fin de siecle apocalyptic child, representative of the human capacity for vandalism, chaos, and ultimately, self destruction. Either way, it would seem that children make a most convenient model for the projection of adult hopes and anxieties. Our attitudes today are certainly no more sophisticated than they have been throughout recent history; on the contrary, our treatment of children incites a hysteria and confusion today unlike any other moral issue. Photographs of children are in many ways more challenging than paintings in that they implicate a real child as subject, whether they are pictures made by artists, pornographers, or by the British parents reported to the police by Boots the Chemists for taking snapshots of their seven-year-old daughter in the bath . Now that Rousseau has collided with Freud, images of children sit very uncomfortably. Maintaining “innocence” in a post-Freudian society might even prove to be impossible for the dear, sweet cherubs.

List of images used

1. Titian Rape of Europa ca.1560
2. Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child 1430
3. Donatello David ca. 1453
4. Antonio del Pollaiuolo Martyrdom of St. Sebastian 1475
5. Domenico del Ghirlandaio Portrait of Franco Sassetti and His Son ca. 1485
6. Angelo Bronzino A Princess of the House of Medici 1553
7. Anthony Van Dyck Portrait of Filippo Cattaneo 1623
8. Anthony Van Dyck George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham and Lord Francis Villiers 1635
9. Thomas Gainsborough The Blue Boy c.1770
10. Sir Joshua Reynolds The Age of Innocence c.1788
11. Sir Joshua Reynolds Portrait of Penelope Boothby 1788
12. Sir Joshua Reynolds The Children of Edward Holden Cruttenden with an Indian Ayah 1759-62
13. William Hogarth The Graham Children 1742
14. John Everett Millais Cherry Ripe 1879
15. John Everett Millais Bubbles 1886
16. John Everett Millais Afternoon Tea
17. Kate Greenaway Ring-a-Ring-a-Roses 1881
18. Anne Geddes Bunny In a Crate 1995
19. Mary Cassatt Mother and Child
20. Mary Cassatt Mother and Child 1890 (study)
21. Berthe Morisot The Artist’s sister Edma with daughter Jeanne 1872
22. Pablo Picasso The Sabines - Sketchbook #163 1962
23. Tracey Moffat Doll Birth (from the series Scarred for Life) 1994
24. Inez Van Lamsweerde Floortje Kick Ass 1993
25. Inez Van Lamsweerde Kirsten 1996
26. Dinos and Jake Chapman Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic De-sublimated Libidinal Model (enlarged x1000) 1995
27. Larry Clark Kids 1995
28. Larry Clark Brother and Sister 1973

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CRUTCHFIELD, Jean (Editor), HIXSON, Kathryn and HOBBS, Robert. Presumed Innocence. Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997.

EINBERG, Elizabeth. The Burlington Magazine Vol.130 (November 1988) p.798-99.

FINEBERG, Jonathan. The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist. New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997.

FULTON, Christopher. The Boy Stripped Bare by His Elders, Art Journal Vol. 56 No. 2 Summer 1997 College Art Association, New York, p31-40.

GODFREY, F. M. Child Portraiture from Bellini to Czanne. London, The Studio Ltd, 1956.

HIGGONET, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London, Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1998.

KINCAID, James R. Child-Loving : The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York, Routledge, 1992.

LEMPRIÈRE, John. Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary. London, Bracken Books, 1994.

SMITH, Lindsay. Art History Take Back Your Mink: Lewis Carroll, Child Masquerade and the Age of Consent. Vol.16 no.3 September 1993 pp.369-385.

MARGARONIS, Maria. Talking About Kids. Index Online: Looking at Kids.
http://www.indexoncensorship.org/issue297/margaronis.htm

MEYER SPACKS, Patricia. The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination. New York, Basic Books Inc., 1981.

STEWARD, James Christen. The New Child - British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830. University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, 1995.

PATTISON, Robert. The Child Figure in English Literature. Athens, The University of Georgia Press, 1978.

POINTON, Marcia R. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993.

POINTON, Marcia R. and ADLER, Kathleen. The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

ROSENBLUM, Robert. The Romantic Child: from Runge to Sendak. Great Britain, Thames and Hudson, 1988.