In Search of the New Child: 1730-1830

James Christen Steward's The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830 examines the construction of childhood as it was reflected in and shaped by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, and it aims "to place the evolving representation of children and their families in Georgian Britain . . . in the context of their time" (11). The book, magnificently illustrated with fifty-one color plates and over a hundred black and white illustrations, was published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name organized by the University Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley—an archive whose wonderful collection of material supports, queries, and complicates Steward's narrative of juvenile representation in art and literature.

Because the history of childhood is an intellectual minefield, perhaps it was simple prudence for Steward to chart a centrist course. He concedes that Georgian attitudes toward children show considerable continuity with earlier periods, yet he insists that these attitudes did undergo some striking changes from 1730 to 1830. Questioning social historians' reliance on theoretical pronouncements about child-rearing, Steward sensibly assumes a likely gap between theory and practice in this matter, and he looks to private memoirs, letters, and journals for more reliable evidence as to what actually happened between parents and their children. The New Child thus contextualizes visual representations of children within "a tapestry woven of letters, diaries, statistical information, and the evidence of other works of art" (12), in order to explore the period's construction and experience of childhood.

Steward offers a marvelous gallery of paintings, sumptuously reproduced in full-page color plates and chosen to reveal "some of the new questions faced by artists concerning children, the family, and constructs of childhood as well as their coexistence with traditional manners of representation" (19). An introduction preceding the plates identifies assorted "issues in depicting children that are culturally specific to the Georgian period and therefore socially driven," and suggests that the subsequent text, plates and additional pictures show "with what diversity artists addressed these issues" (19). Among the topics Steward notices in the following chapters is a new "interest in candor and the observed 'childlike' nature of children" (19). He documents a novel spontaneity and freedom in the way children are presented and shows how the scale and design of many new paintings focus attention on children. Steward comments shrewdly on the way children could be used to subvert or comment on the pretensions of adult figures. And he shows how themes of childhood play and lessons could be handled in genre paintings to reveal much about an emergent separate sphere of child life. A final section on the boldness with which some artists—especially in "fancy pictures" (portraits of models playacting in some emblematic fashion)—tested propriety in subtly suggesting childhood sexuality opens up an area of discussion so rich as almost to deserve another volume.

Steward makes excellent use of memoirs, letters, and art history to support his reading of pictures. For example, in his discussion of Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Lady Caroline Scott as Winter, he explains that contemporary sources indicate Reynolds was known for his empathy with his child sitters. Knowing some of Reynolds's favorite strategies, Steward suggests that the artist used small animals in this picture to focus the viewer's attention on the girl. But because such animals were also used emblematically, he suspects the animal reference may also be intended to reinforce the notion that the child's world shown here is innocent. For Steward, "the artist has caught his child sitter at a single moment in her life, one in which she . . . is both fragile and vibrant, forthright and in need of protection" (21). Any reader is free to test this reading by inspecting the picture itself, reproduced in the text, but he or she might also consider the confirmation presented by a sophisticated connoisseur...