Depicting Canada’s Children

INTRODUCTION

D epicting canada’s children is an anthology of essays on the visual representation of children drawing on imagery from the seventeenth century to the present. The purpose of this volume is to bring together a rich array of subjects to encourage a critical perspective in the analysis of pictures of Canadian children. Recognizing the importance of methodological diversity, these essays discuss understandings of children and childhood that encompass a wide range of media and contexts. In the process, they provide a close study of the evolution of the figure of the child and shed light on the defining role children have played in Canadian history and our assumptions about them. The topics address many issues, including child imagery, the ideologies of childhood, race, class, gender , architectural spaces, children’s bodies, sexuality, and the commercialization of childhood. The subject of childhood has been studied from differing viewpoints, covering such disciplines as art history, history, anthropology, developmental psychology, sociology , and literary criticism. Indebted to the findings of these studies, this volume has as its objective to demonstrate the significance of visual culture within this field of inquiry.1 More than an examination of images in formal settings such as art galleries and museums, visual culture takes into account the components of an image and the role of the making of pictorial works in everyday life. It also looks at how the making of images relates to intellectual, cultural, and political history, as well as to theoretical constructs such as semiotics, psychology, and feminism. All types of pictures—oil paintings, children ’s drawings, architectural renderings, photographs, snapshots, commercial reproductions , cartoons, advertisements, and films—are given equal weight in this treatment. Whether canonical or not, the images discussed here advance our understanding of Canada’s children and Canadian childhood. INTRODUCTION xv LOREN LERNER xvi introduction The visual representation of children has been the subject of a number of important studies, but this attention is still relatively new. Further, these studies have been devoted mainly to works of art. Robert Rosenblum’s The Romantic Child from Runge to Sendak is one of the first monographs on this theme.2 In this short text, which covers the late eighteenth century to recent times, Rosenblum looks at the romanticized vision of children in paintings and book illustrations as observed reality and allegorical symbol . In Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, Anne Higonnet takes another point of view.3 She notes that the emphasis on the child’s body in the mass production of illustrations and photographs beginning in the late nineteenth century led to the transformation of the Romantic child into the “knowing child” possessed of a more complex, ambiguous, and problematic constellation of attributes. Focusing on national identity, David Lubin, in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth -Century America, explains that the portrayal of middle-class children in genre paintings during that century relates to America’s image of itself as a national entity in how it thought it was or should be.4 Claire Perry, in Young America: Childhood in Nineteenth -Century Art and Culture, broadens the scope by showing that nineteenth-century America saw within itself a wide range of children: male and female, white and Indian, truant and studious.5 European artists from the nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I—Gustave Courbet, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Oskar Kokoschka, Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, and Egon Schiele—are the subject of a series of essays in Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud, edited by Marilyn R. Brown.6 These essays discuss how images of childhood that were central to the production of modern art coalesce with the emergence of the modern concept of childhood, which began with the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile in 1762. In a more wide-ranging survey of images of children in the history of Western art, Erika Langmuir’s Imagining Childhood: Themes in the Imagery of Childhood addresses themes such as the family, aging, loss of innocence, illness, and death to explore how childhood is visualized.7 Although Depicting Canada’s Children favours a more inclusive corpus of images than do the publications cited above, it shares with these texts two premises: the idea that the child is a historically changeable social construction that can inform our learning about actual children, and the warning not to interpret these representations simply as illustrations of a verifiable external reality. Making images presupposes the agency of a creator...