Children Paintings

Children in the history of painting

Portrait painting is a genre where the intent is to represent a specific human subject, and works of that kind serve as important state and family records as well as remembrances. For most of European history a child in the frame was part of that record: a son who would inherit, a daughter whose marriage mattered, a family group that needed to exist on a wall.

What changed in the nineteenth century was the reason. Childhood itself became a subject, rather than a stage on the way to adult life, and painters set out to show what it is like to be small: a figure carrying a jug too heavy for her, a boy at the edge of a river, two of them crossing a ford. That shift is why so much of this page comes from the 19th century, and why these works feel contemporary even when the clothes do not.

The other thing worth knowing is that these are not family commissions. Almost every canvas here came from a model, as a subject for an exhibition or a sale, which is why the same faces recur in different compositions by one hand.

Famous paintings of children

These are the paintings people ask for by name, and each can be ordered as a hand-painted reproduction in oil.

• The Young Shepherdess by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the single most requested of them in the store.
• Child Holding Flowers, The Cup of Milk, Young Girl Sewing, Going to the Bath, On the rock, Vocation, The Taste of the Fields and Cupid's Secrets, all by the same hand. Bouguereau used mythological themes in his realistic genre pictures and finished 822 known paintings.
• The Crossing of the Ford and Passage gue, two versions of the same river crossing.
• Little Girl's Head, head with Hands and Study for Vierge aux anges, two studies rather than finished work.
• The Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer, dated about 1665. It went by various names over the centuries and acquired its present title towards the end of the 20th century; it has been in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902 and has been the subject of various literary and cinematic treatments.
• Child with Cat, Julie Manet by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Girl with a Cat by Ivan Kramskoy, two children with very patient animals.
• Portrait of Wladek Szerner by Wladyslaw Czachorski and Portrait of Louise Vernet as a Child by Theodore Gericault.
• American Gothic by Grant Wood, a 1930 oil on beaverboard by the American Regionalist Grant Wood, showing a Midwestern farmer and his daughter standing in front of their Carpenter Gothic style home. It is one of the most famous American works of the 20th century and gets referenced in popular culture constantly.
• First Steps, after Millet by Vincent van Gogh, a child learning to walk.
• Portrait of Gabrielle Cot and Portrait of Flora Harwood Gibb by James Taylor Harwood.
• The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius, the small panel that generations of children have loved before anything else in a museum.

Bouguereau, and why this page is largely his

One name dominates. Bouguereau was a French academic painter who, in his realistic genre pictures, used mythological themes and made modern interpretations of classical subjects with an emphasis on the female human body. He finished 822 known paintings, enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors and received top prices for his work. As the quintessential salon painter of his generation he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde, and he and his art had fallen out of favor with the public by 1910, due in part to changing tastes. In the 1980s a revival of interest in figure work led to a rediscovery of both.

These works are the reason most people arrive here. A shepherdess, a girl sewing, a child holding flowers, a cup of milk: the subjects are plain, the finish is extraordinary, and the sentiment is completely unembarrassed. Critics spent most of the last hundred years objecting to exactly that, and buyers ignored it entirely.

If you want to understand what he was doing, look at the hands and the feet rather than the faces. A small hand is soft and structurally complicated, and the difference between him and his imitators is visible there in about two seconds.

What the pictures show them doing

The page divides in a way that is useful when you are choosing. There are working children: a shepherdess with her flock, a seamstress at a window, a boy in a field. These are the largest group and the most interesting, since they are about labor as much as about childhood.

Then the ones at play or at rest: on a rock, in a garden, holding flowers, with a cat on a lap. These are the easiest to live with and the most popular for a bedroom or a nursery.

Then the formal portraits of a named child, like Wladek Szerner or Gericault's Louise Vernet. These behave like adult work and they suit a hallway or a stair.

And the ones inside a larger scene: a group, a religious subject, a crowd. American Gothic belongs here, since the younger of the two is the farmer's daughter and the work is about the pair rather than about either one.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring, and who these sitters were

One of the most famous pictures in the world is on this page because of the age of the person in it. The Girl with a Pearl Earring is an oil painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, dated about 1665. It went by various names over the centuries and acquired its present title towards the end of the 20th century, it has been in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902, and it has been the subject of various literary and cinematic treatments.

Nobody knows who she was. That is true of a great many of the best works of this kind: the identity of the subject in Gainsborough's Blue Boy is disputed, and half the models in French work of that period were professionals whose names were never recorded. What survives is a face, and often the face is enough.

Artists, schools and where to look

Beyond Bouguereau there is more here than the front of the grid suggests, and it is worth knowing which artists to look for.

The Dutch and Flemish schools give you the oldest material: Johannes Vermeer, Carel Fabritius and the Jan Steen tradition of noisy households. The Jan Steen kind of picture, full of figures and disorder, is the opposite of a formal likeness and it is the closest thing in old painting to a snapshot.

The French school of the 1800s is the heart of the page. Bouguereau, Gericault, and the Paris salon painters around them made this a commercial genre, and the school produced a great deal of it. Henri Rousseau sits at the odd edge of the same period: Henri Rousseau was a French post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner, also known as Le Douanier, who began painting seriously in his early forties and retired at 49 to work full-time.

The Russians and the Poles are the underused group. Ivan Kramskoy and Wladyslaw Czachorski both made pictures of young sitters that stand beside anything in Paris, and almost nobody searches for them. If you want something nobody else in your street will have, that is where to look.

And the Americans. Grant Wood's farmer and his daughter is the most famous American picture of the 20th century, and Mary Cassatt's name comes up in every conversation about mothers and children in art history, though her work is not in this catalog.

Mothers, families and the group picture

A large part of the subject is not a single figure at all. A mother with an infant is one of the oldest arrangements in European art, inherited from religious work, and in time it became a domestic subject in its own right. The other side of that relationship arrives late: Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 by James McNeill Whistler is a picture of his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, made in 1871, and it is one of the most famous works by an American artist outside the United States. Van Gogh's First Steps, after Millet is exactly that: a parent, a child, and a first attempt at walking.

Groups behave differently on a wall from single sitters. A group invites you to work out the relationships, which is a slower pleasure, and it holds up in a hallway where people pass rather than sit. A single figure asks for attention and rewards a room where you sit still.

If you have a choice, think about who will see the picture most. A group is a sociable object and does well in a living room or a kitchen. A head study of one child is a private one, and it belongs where one person sits.

Childhood, and how the subject changed

It is worth putting a date on the shift. Before about 1750 children are usually dressed as small adults and posed as such. Time and a great deal of social change made that unbearable, and by the nineteenth century childhood had become a distinct condition worth painting for itself: play, sleep, curiosity, boredom, a task too big for the person doing it.

Van Gogh's First Steps, after Millet is a good marker of the new mood. So is every Bouguereau on this page. The subject was popular then for the same reason it is popular now, which is that somebody small doing something for the first time is one of the few things in art that nobody has to have explained.

Paris was the center of it. The salon system created a market for exactly this kind of picture, the exhibitions were free to enter for much of the season, and a painter who could handle these subjects well could make a career of it. Bouguereau did.

Love, life and the pictures people keep

There is a practical reason this subject sells steadily while others come and go. A young face is the one thing most buyers are happy to look at every day for twenty years, and the reasons have nothing to do with art history at all. It is a face at the start of a life, and that is a lot to get from a rectangle of canvas.

Two observations from what actually leaves the studio. The ones where something ordinary is happening outsell the pretty ones: a cup of milk, a needle and thread, a pair of bare feet in a stream. And the ones that capture a specific moment rather than a general mood keep their interest longest, which is why a first step or a crossing of a ford holds up better than a posed head.

The other thing worth saying plainly: this collection is museum work, not a commission service. Everything here is a reproduction of an existing painting from the history of art, made by hand in oil, and nothing on this page is made to order from anything you supply. What you are buying is a picture that already exists and has existed for a century or more.

Periods, and where the good ones are

Old material first. The Dutch Golden Age gives you the most contemporary-looking children in all of old painting, because those artists were painting middle-class households rather than dynasties, and a young figure in a Dutch interior behaves like one.

Then the 18th century, which invented the modern idea of childhood and dressed it in silk. High formality, pale colors, a great deal of charm, and the occasional picture where the sitter is clearly bored out of their mind.

Then the 19th century, which is most of this page: the salon, the studio model, the rural subject, and a market that wanted exactly this. The best of it is as good as any figure painting of the period, and the worst of it is very sweet indeed.

Then the early modern years, where the subject gets looser and stranger. Renoir's Julie Manet with a cat sits here, and so does van Gogh after Millet, and both are freer than anything the salon allowed.

Choosing one of these

Start with the scale of the figure. A head study works at a small size and rewards being hung low, near a chair or a bed. A full-length figure in a landscape needs room and wants the middle or upper sizes.

Then look at where the eyes go. A sitter looking out of the canvas makes contact with the room and will hold attention from the doorway. Somebody absorbed in a task lets you look without being looked at, which is easier to live with over years.

Then think about the light. The nineteenth century pictures are mostly outdoor and pale, and they want daylight. The Dutch and the formal likenesses are darker and want a lamp.

One practical note: this is the subject people most often buy as a gift, and the safest choice for somebody else is a child at rest in a landscape at a middle size. It suits almost any room and commits the recipient to nothing.

How each reproduction is made

One studio hand works from the museum reference in oil, building the figure as the original was built, with the flesh tones in layers and the finest marks last. Nothing is printed and nothing is transferred. Seven sizes are available with an optional frame, and you approve a photo of the finished work before it ships. Free worldwide shipping and 90-day returns apply. On this subject look closely at the mouth and the hands in the approval photo, because a small face goes wrong faster than a grown one when a copy is weak.

Browse related collections

The subject sits inside portraiture and overlaps two other groups.

• The portrait group for sitters of every age.
• Women and girls for the female subject.
• Family and group scenes for more than one figure.
• Angels and cherubs for the winged version of the same faces.
• The Bouguereau catalog, the artist most of this page belongs to.

Frequently asked questions

Are these family likenesses of real children? A few are, and they are named in the title, like Wladek Szerner or Louise Vernet as a Child. Those are true portraits. Most are subject pictures painted from a model for an exhibition, which is why the same face appears in several works by the same artist.

Who is the girl with a pearl earring? Nobody knows. The picture is dated about 1665, it went by various names over the centuries and acquired its present title towards the end of the 20th century, and it has been in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902.

Are these prints? No. Each is an original oil on canvas, done by hand in the studio, in seven sizes, with an optional frame and a photo of the finished work for your approval before it ships.