Guest Editor's Introduction: Children in Museum Settings

The eight papers in this special issue engage with one of two meanings of "children in museum settings." The first relates to how social concerns, economic conditions, and cultural trends influence the ideas we have about children and, as a consequence, the ways childhood is represented in museums and galleries. The second involves how exhibitions for children perceive their attitudes and educational needs.

This issue's emphasis on museums is an appropriate tribute to Philippe Ariès, the French medievalist and founding father of childhood studies who considered artworks and other artifacts to be crucial to his work. In the course of conducting research for Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962), he collected a large corpus of visual material, central to which were works of art he saw in exhibitions and art publications.¹ Although historians have widely dismissed Ariès's conclusions about the lives of children, which he arrived at without an understanding of iconographic analysis, his use of visual material to explore the lives of children was groundbreaking.² Building on this premise, in recent years material culture—namely, the physical objects created and used by a society—has proven to be valuable when studying the history of young people.

Of importance to using material culture when undertaking this kind of study are the methods of iconography, to comprehend how different types of images and objects are used to impart particular interpretations of reality. Historians recognize that while representation is not objective, it does provide evidence of the realities lived by children and youth. For example, examining images from the perspective of how the artists intended viewers to receive them can offer critical insights into conventions, practices, and beliefs. At the same time, it is understood that most of the material culture relating to children and youth belong, or once belonged, to adults with the means to create, commission, or procure them. Thus, objects associated with children and youth are acknowledged to be mainly the result of adult interpretations. Still, these adult-made paintings, sculptures, photographs, and other media can provide a roadmap of changing perceptions of childhood, as well as of the social and cultural issues that have affected adult expectations of young people over time and in different places.

Numerous art exhibitions in the first two decades of the twenty-first century have focused on what artworks and artifacts can tell us about young people and childhood. To understand the many opportunities youth-related material culture offers for wide-ranging research—as evidenced by the essays in this special issue—it is helpful to have a feeling for the scope of similarly themed exhibitions that have been mounted in different historical periods.

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The artists of ancient Greece were probably the first to create pictures of children who did not resemble miniaturized adults. Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past (Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 2003; Getty Center, Los Angeles, 2004) was the first major exhibition to examine representations of children from that period.³ The art objects, including grave monuments, votive reliefs, and painted vases, depict the distinctive expressions and gestures of children as they engage in universal activities like crawling and playing, as well as activities specific to Greek society such as participating in religious ceremonies. They also show children as they were envisioned in mythological narratives.

Jumping centuries forward, the exhibition Children at Their Finest: Portraits of Children in the Low Countries 1500–1700 (Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem, 2000; Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, 2001) took a more concentrated approach, limiting itself to portraiture.⁴ The works explored the affection felt by wealthy families in the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic for their young children. These individual portraits, conceived at a time when elsewhere only nobility had the means and status to have their children depicted by artists, reveal with realistic detail what Dutch children wore and the toys and pets they played with. The transience of life and the importance of discipline were also represented. Another portrait exhibition, which looked at a...