Art: Changing Images of Childhood

Using paintings, Atlanta show traces evolving U.S. attitudes

"The easiest way of becoming acquainted with the rules of conduct and the prevailing manner of any people," wrote St. John de Crevecoeur in 1782 about his years in America, "is to examine what sort of education they give their children, how they treat them at home, and what they are taught." Among the most vivid documents tracing our evolving attitudes toward children are the works of American artists. Using their portraits as a kind of visual social history, Emory University Graduate Student Rosamund Humm organized a show called "Children in America," at Atlanta's High Museum of Art now through May 27. The show illustrates the changing images of childhood from colonial days to the present—a vision particularly apropos in this, the United Nations' International Year of the Child.

Seventeenth century artists depicted sober, stiff youngsters, dour in face, erect in posture, adult in demeanor. Life for a child in Puritan New England, after all, was a sobering proposition: one-half of all youngsters died before the age of ten, and those who survived were continually reminded that they had been born in sin and were doomed to hell if they did not submit to the commandments of parent and preacher. To adults, play was a manifestation of a depraved nature, and they tried to coerce their children into becoming models of rectitude. One dictum for raising properly passive Puritan offspring: "Once a day, take something from them." Children were hurried into adult responsibilities: by three, some were learning Latin; by 16, graduating from college.

Befitting their grownup role in society, children were dressed like miniature adults. And since all good Calvinists looked upon wealth as a sign that they were among God's elect, those clothes were frequently expensive, ornate garments in the latest European styles. In Jeremiah Theus' 1753 formal portrait of Ralph Izard, for instance, the young man wears an immaculate gentleman's outfit, complete with ruffled shirt and silver-trimmed tricorn hat. All of twelve years old, he is painted as lord of the manor, stiffly gesturing toward his property.

By the mid-18th century, Enlightenment notions of free will and human progress had begun to challenge harsh determinist doctrines. Americans had come to accept the theories of English Philosopher John Locke, who wrote widely on child rearing, speculating that children were not born depraved, but that the "souls of the newly born are just empty tablets afterwards to be filled in by observation and reasoning."