Child-life in Art

by Estelle M. Hurll

Perhaps the most extensively known of all Gainsborough’s delineations of country child-life is the Rustic Children of the National Gallery. The central figure is a young girl, standing, with a child in her arms; a boy sits on the bank beside her with a bundle of fagots. The group is artistically conceived, with one of Gainsborough’s characteristic landscapes as a background, showing a cottage home. The children are graceful and natural, with that indefinable poetic charm peculiar to the painter’s work.

A picture attracting a great deal of admiration in the lifetime of Gainsborough, was the Boy at the Stile. While this treasure was still in the hands of the artist, he was visited one day by Colonel Hamilton, then considered the finest violinist of his times. Gainsborough, a devoted lover of music, begged him to play, and when the first air was finished, rapturously exclaimed, “Now, my dear Colonel, if you will but go on, I will give you that picture of the Boy at the Stile, which you so wished to purchase of me.”

In half an hour the prize was won, and both parties were well satisfied with the agreement.

In studying Gainsborough’s rustic children as a class, it is noticeable that he emphasizes the pathetic side of their life; instead of a thrifty, tidy appearance, in which England’s village children are by no means lacking, he gives his subjects a careless, neglected air. The Rustic Children of the National Gallery are unnecessarily ragged; their hair is wild and dishevelled, and their general appearance untidy. Many of the children of the most celebrated pictures are attractive from a delicate, refined beauty, rather than from the robust and healthy vitality we naturally associate with country life. This makes their surroundings incongruous, and we feel sorry that they are not in their true sphere. The child who stands, half-clad, before the hearth-fire, in the painting called the “Little Cottager,” has the delicate features of a true aristocrat. No cottage boy this, with shapely hands and large, melancholy eyes. His wistfulness is so touching that we would fain snatch him from his surroundings, and set him down amidst the soft luxuries which belong to him by right.

The Shepherd Boy in a Storm has the face and expression of a poet, as he lifts his beautiful eyes to the overhanging clouds, with nothing of fear or shrinking, but with apparent admiration for the grandeur of Nature.

Gainsborough painted many scenes of child-life in which animals are introduced, as in the picture of a girl holding a child on a donkey, and in one representing two shepherd boys looking on at fighting dogs. He did not hesitate before a subject which would have appalled most artists, and which, in other hands, would have been vulgar and common,—A Girl Feeding Pigs. This he painted with such skill that Reynolds instantly recognized its greatness, and eagerly purchased it for a sum far in advance of the price modestly named by the painter. The amusing anecdote is related concerning this work that a countryman, who studied it attentively some time, gave it as his opinion that “they be deadly like pigs; but nobody ever saw pigs feeding together but what one on ’em had a foot in the trough.”

Gainsborough[9] is pronounced by Ruskin the purest colorist of the English school, taking rank beside Rubens, and adding a lustre to the fame of British art which time can do nothing to dim. His style is so peculiarly individual in its characteristics that it cannot properly be compared with that of any other artist; but his predilection for subjects drawn from rural child-life finds a parallel in the work of his French contemporary, Jean Baptiste Greuze.[10]

The pictures by which Greuze made his early reputation, and which perhaps he never excelled in later times, were the Father Explaining the Bible to his Children,[11] and the Village Bride.[12] Both represent family scenes among village people, and contain, as their most charming features, some delightfully natural children. One could scarcely find anything more deliciously childlike than the mischievous little ones who gather about the table to listen to the Father Explaining the Bible, and whose love of fun even this solemn occasion cannot repress. Equally attractive are the young people gathering affectionately and tearfully about their pretty elder sister, the Village Bride, who comes with her lover to receive the parental blessing.

The appearance of these two compositions made their artist famous, and won for him the ardent admiration and powerful friendship of the encyclopædist Diderot. Continuing his work along this new[13] line of subjects, Greuze went on to paint many other scenes in the child-life of the country. Two notable companion pictures of this kind are the Departure of the Cradle, and the Return from the Nurse, founded upon a phase of French village life quite unknown in many other countries, namely, the custom among busy working-people of sending their infants out to board with nurses. Unnatural as was the custom, it by no means indicated a lack of family affection, as is seen in these charming compositions. In both cases, the child, at first an infant, and later a little boy a year or two old, is the centre of the group, fondled and admired by all.

The pre-eminence of Greuze was due not only to the entire novelty of his chosen range of subjects, but to the exquisite beauty of his technique. He excelled in painting those fresh carnations, “mixed with lilies and roses,” as the French used to say, and diversified with blue-gray shadows and warm reflected light. Such characteristics are easily carried to extremes, and were often exaggerated by Greuze himself; but when held in true control they are a delight to the eye of the true color-lover.