Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood - Review

Art in America, Feb, 1999 by Calvin Bedient

Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, by Anne Higonnet, London, Thames and Hudson, 1998; 250 pages, $39.95 hard-cover, $24.95 paper.

Anne Higonnet's book is a history of the long reign and current crisis of the Romantic image of the innocent child. The problem lies in the recent emergence of a counter-invention, "the Knowing child," who can intimidate the innocent child (a 17th-century idea that became a pictorial convention in the 18th) just by giving it a worldly-wise look. There is a dilemma of the image of the Knowing child, in turn: the law sometimes objects to its naked, too known, and supposedly too knowing body.

The Romantic image can be seen in this generously illustrated volume in full, gorgeous form in Joshua Reynolds's The Age of Innocence 1788) and Portrait of Penelope Boothby (ca. 1788). Luxurious swathings of white cloth identify each young girl with what Higonnet, an associate professor of art history at Wellesley, calls middle-class "affluent cleanliness and absence of want." While Penelope Boothby is, as Higonnet says, "endearingly miniaturized," particularly by the white mobcap that repeats the outline of her head in great frilly scallops, the girl in The Age of Innocence looms so much in the foreground, where she sits as if side-saddle on the ground, that the landscape and buildings behind her might be her toys. But both girls are pearls of great price displayed in the open box of the canvas. They illustrate the emergence in Western painting of the child who is precious as such--the more so because her beauty is the outward show of her innocence--and not a stumpy copy of a grown-up, not an adult-in-the-making, as in previous art.

By the time modern pictures of childhood began to appear in significant numbers, several concepts crucial to a new attitude were firmly in place: a private, nurturing middle-class nuclear family as the building block of society, a capitalist opposition between masculine public and feminine domestic spheres, and a political belief in the innate worth of the individual. Together, these concepts fostered a sheltered, mothering domain within which childhood could exist apart.

Women artists like Julia Margaret Cameron and Alice Hughes were later to popularize and market the new image of the innocent child, largely because, as Higonnet is at some pains to explain, they were debarred from other artistic routes. But, whatever the "sheltered, mothering domain" implied by these images, it's worth asking what was at stake for the male artists who originated and perfected it--among them, Reynolds, Benjamin West, Thomas Gainsborough, Emile Munier and John Everett Millais.

The Romantic poets may help us to an answer. Describing a slumbering infant, Blake wrote of "Soft desires I can trace,/ Secret joys and secret smiles,/ Little pretty infant wiles." The sleeping child has, for him, a special, untranslatable knowledge. And so it is with Wordsworth's "six years' Darling of a pygmy size," who "cometh from afar ... trailing clouds of glow." The poet complains that "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," but "Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ Upon the growing Boy."

The innocent child is thus more than a middle-class darling pygmy; it's what middle-class leisure made possible--dream-time in the flesh, a relatively pampered and prolonged childhood. Latent in the innocent child is a ram kind of knowledge, a spiritual preknowledge. Penelope Boothby looks off to the side not just of the canvas, but of the visible. Higonnet notes the absence of mundane thought and the respite from awareness of time in the innocent child, but doesn't venture to trace them to roots in the preconscious that made of Romanticism a new flowering of the spirit.

Instead, the author finds still another kind of knowledge shadowing the picture: "Every sweetly sunny, innocently cute Romantic child image stows away a dark side: a threat of loss, of change, and, ultimately, of death. Romantic images of childhood gain power not only from their charms, but also from their menace." One wonders where this stowaway darkness is located if it isn't visible. Higonnet seems here to transfer to paintings the theory (found in Susan Sontag's On Photography and Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida) that sees the photograph as death's trophy. Is a painting similarly suspect? If the photograph turns one into an object, into "Death in person," as Barthes put it, painting has to be composed over time: the image isn't caught "dead" directly from its source.

In the main, however, contemporary art historians are less keen to find death in the white-cloud-with-a-face of a Penelope Boothby than sexual knowledge haunting some of the classic images of the innocent child. Joining them, Higonnet indulges, I think, in some knowing speculation that leaves the answer to the question "Whose sexual knowledge?" sensationally ambiguous.

Do the imagined girls in both [Seymour Joseph Guy's] Making a Train [1867] and [Emile Munier's] Girl with Kittens [ca. 1850-60] mimic adult feminine flirtation a bit too well, providing viewers with the signs of sexual availability coyly grafted onto bodies coded with the signs of innocence?