19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2004 by Barbara Dayer Gallati

[T]he young people are eating us up,--there is nothing in America but the young people. The country is made for the rising generation.... Longfellow wrote a charming little poem called "The Children's Hour," but he ought to have called it "The Children's Century." And by children, of course, I don't mean simple infants; I mean everything of less than twenty.

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Thus did the elderly Miss Sturdy lament in "The Point of View," (1) a short story by Henry James (1843-1916), reflecting a central concern in late nineteenth-century Western culture. (2) English art critics expressed like thoughts about the prevalence of children, citing the "baby disease" that had contaminated the subject matter of contemporary art. (3) But it was not only young children but also adolescents who were receiving unprecedented notice. This was an outcome of the prolongation of childhood as a consequence of economic and social changes, which allowed James's Miss Sturdy to define a child as anyone younger than twenty.

Although such sentiments were not presented as definitively in contemporaneous visual arts, a new iconography of childhood did emerge in the work of English and American artists that parallels the literary emphases cited here. This article is an introductory examination of the place occupied by adolescence within the broader category of child subjects at the close of the nineteenth and opening of the twentieth century.

John Singer Sargent figures prominently among the artists whose pictures of children not only reflect an awareness of adolescence as a distinct physical phase bridging childhood and adulthood, but also incorporate the introspection associated with the adolescent state. (4) His depiction of the fifteen-year-old Edouard Pailleron Jr. in a large double portrait of the boy and his sister Marie-Louise (Pl. II) is arguably one of the most compelling nineteenth-century depictions of an adolescent boy. Although most of the critical discussion devoted to the canvas has focused on the tense Marie-Louise, it is worth noting that Sargent gave equal aesthetic weight to Edouard's dark asymmetry by presenting it as a series of formal oppositions that differentiate childhood from adolescence. Whereas the girl's white dress, strict frontal pose, and openly defiant expression may be interpreted as the transparency of a child's emotions, Edouard's dark, irregular contour, mannered pose, and enigmatic look evoke the mysteries of adolescence, a period critical in the formation of a personal identity. (5) The flamelike tones of the drapery backdrop, sometimes taken to refer to sibling conflict, radiate more intensely behind Edouard. This may have been merely an aesthetic decision on Sargent's part to highlight Edouard, but it may also have been intended to emphasize the turbulence of adolescent emotions.

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Not long after completing the Pailleron commission Sargent approached the problem of painting the four daughters of Edward Darley Boit (Pl. III) in a similar vein. By coincidence, their ages (Julia was four, Mary Louisa was eight, and Jane and Florence were twelve and fourteen, respectively) imposed the structure of a growth narrative in which their progress toward maturity is symbolically underscored by the nature of the space they occupy. The sisters are shown in what is presumed to be the foyer of the Boit family's Paris apartment, a transitional area that separates public and private spheres. As he had done with the Pailleron portrait, Sargent seems to have purposely used light to distinguish differences in age. Julia and Mary Louisa are in bright raking light while the two older girls (whose faces are obscured) stand at the threshold of a room whose dim interior can be interpreted as a metaphor for the undecipherable workings of the adolescent mind and for the physical and emotional transitions associated with human development.

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Developmental stages were also differentiated in Cecilia Beaux's Dorothea and Francesca (Pl. V), a double portrait of two of the daughters of Richard Watson Gilder, a respected American poet and editor of the Century Monthly Magazine. Here the sixteen-year-old Dorothea is shown teaching her little sister to dance, conceptually initiating her into another range of experience. The compositional parallels between the two figures mark this as a graceful ritual that implies the smooth crossing from one stage of childhood to another. The tenderness of Beaux's imagery (consistently attributed to women's special talent for portraying childhood) creates a positive attitude toward maturing and harmonizes with the general aura of optimism surrounding the future of the United States at the time. These ideas were part of an evolutionary concept of the nation on a progressive road to success as it emerged from its political and cultural infancy into a period of adolescence. (6) This progress onward and upward was overtly conveyed in, for example, Charles Courtney Curran's popular On the Heights (Pl. IV).