We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2016
Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood is now over 50 years old, but it holds its place as a pioneering study of childhood, education and the family. Furthermore, Ariès’s use of images continues to attract comment. This article reflects on the role of visual material in Aries's narrative, subsequent criticism, and more recent work in the field by both historians and art historians. Building on an important discussion of the same subject by Anthony Burton, published in Continuity and Change in 1989, it explores ongoing issues around the role of images as evidence for the histories of children and childhood.
L'ouvrage Centuries of Childhood [1962, traduit de L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime, Paris, 1960] de Philippe Ariès a maintenant plus de cinquante ans mais il conserve sa place d’étude pionnière sur l'enfance, l’éducation et la famille. Qui plus est, la façon dont Ariès y a fait usage de l'iconographie n'a jamais cessé d'attirer les commentaires. Cet article se penche sur le rôle donné par Ariès au visuel, à l'image-objet d'histoire dans le livre, sur les critiques ultérieures, et des travaux plus récents dans ce domaine, venant à la fois des historiens et des historiens de l'art. Partant d'une discussion importante menée par Anthony Burton et publiée dans Continuity and Change en 1989, précisément sur ce thème, notre étude explore les questions actuellement débattues sur le rôle des images regardées comme document-témoin, s'agissant de l'histoire des enfants et de l'enfance.
Philippe Ariès’s Geschichte der Kindheit ist jetzt über 50 Jahre alt, was aber seinem Rang als Pionierarbeit über Kindheit, Erziehung und Familie keinen Abbruch getan hat. Außerdem ruft Ariès’s Verwendung von Bildzeugnissen nach wie vor kritische Stellungnahmen hervor. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die Rolle von Bildmaterial in Ariès’s Darstellung, die dadurch ausgelöste Kritik sowie neuere Arbeiten auf diesen Gebiet, und zwar sowohl von Historikern als auch von Kunsthistorikern. Ausgehend von einem wichtigen Diskussionsbeitrag zu diesem Thema von Anthony Burton, der 1989 in Continuity and Change publiziert wurde, untersucht er ungelöste Fragen und Probleme im Zusammenhang mit der Bedeutung von Bildern als Beweismitteln für die Geschichte von Kindern und die Geschichte der Kindheit.
1 Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of childhood, trans. Baldick, Robert (London, 1973), 7Google Scholar. Most of my citations to Ariès will be from this edition.
2 There is now a large literature on art history and visual culture. See, particularly, Mitchell, W. J. T., ‘Interdisciplinarity and visual culture’, Art Bulletin 77, 4 (1995), 540–4Google Scholar; Cherry, Deborah, ‘Art history visual culture’, Art History 27, 4 (2004), 479–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dikovitskaya, Margaret, Visual culture: the study of the visual after the cultural turn (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar.
3 Hutton, Patrick H., Philippe Ariès and the politics of French cultural history (Amherst and Boston, 2004), 104Google Scholar. Hutton deals with the ‘decades of debate about Centuries of Childhood’ in ch. 6. Hutton (p. 148), also notes Philippe and Primerose's collaboration on his ‘picture book’, Images of man and death, trans. Lloyd, Janet (Cambridge, MA, 1985)Google Scholar.
4 For works seen by Ariès in exhibitions such as Le portrait dans l’art Flamand: de Memling à van Dyck, held at the Orangerie in Paris, 21 October 1952–5 January 1953, see, for example, Centuries of childhood, trans. Baldick, Robert (London, 1962)Google Scholar, 14, 15, ns. 2–6. For works found in Bernt's, Walther Die Niederländischen maler des 17 jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Munich, 1948)Google Scholar, later translated as The Netherlandish painters of the seventeenth century, 3 vols. (London, 1970)Google Scholar, see, for example, 78, n. 45 and 120, n. 54. For the use of Stella and Dassonville, see, for example, 45, n. 42; 340, ns. 30, 31. Also, for tapestries found in Heinrich Göbel's Wandteppiche (Leipzig, 1923–34), translated as Tapestries of the lowlands (New York, 1974)Google Scholar, see, for example, 91, n. 77 and 350, n. 60.
5 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 257.
6 See, for example, ibid., 48, 247–8.
7 Lawrence Stone followed Ariès in using some visual evidence to support his narrative of the rise of the companionate family and a new ‘child-oriented, affectionate and permissive mode’ in The family, sex and marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977)Google Scholar, 408–9, 411–12. For accounts of the critical response to Stone, see Wrightson, Keith, ‘The family in early modern England: continuity and change’, in Connors, Richard, Jones, Clyve and Taylor, Stephen eds., Hanoverian England and empire: essays in memory of Philip Lawson (Woodbridge, 1998), 1–22 Google Scholar; Berry, Helen and Foyster, Elizabeth eds., The family in early modern England (Cambridge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. their introduction, 1–17 and Joanne Bailey's essay within, ‘Reassessing parenting in eighteenth-century England’, 209–32.
8 Burton, Anthony, ‘Looking forward from Ariès? Pictorial and material evidence for the history of childhood and family life’, Continuity and Change 4, 2 (1989), 203–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This was a special edition of the journal, on ‘The Child in History’. At this time, Burton was setting up the galleries of the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green.
9 The phrase ‘the new child’ was enshrined in Steward's, J. C. The new child: British art and the origins of modern childhood 1730–1830 (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.
10 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1962). The footnotes were also suppressed in later editions, and they contain some key information about the images to which Ariès refers, and their sourcing. For comment about the lack of illustration in Centuries of childhood, see Burton, ‘Looking forward from Ariès?’, 204 and Wilson, Adrian, ‘The infancy of the history of childhood: an appraisal of Philippe Ariès’, History and Theory 19, 2 (1980), 132–53, here 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 See the most recent English edition: Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of childhood, trans. Baldick, Robert, intro. Phillips, Adam (London, 1996)Google Scholar.
12 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 337. Noted by Burton, ‘Looking forward from Ariès?’, 207.
13 It is significant that the most substantial discussion of Ariès in the six volumes of A cultural history of childhood and family (Oxford and New York, 2010)Google Scholar occurs in that concerned with medieval childhood. Indeed, Louise J. Wilkinson's introduction to A cultural history of childhood and family in the Middle Ages, 1–5, opens with a discussion of Ariès’s ‘stark view of the lives of medieval children’.
14 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 8, 32. See criticisms by Shahar, Shulamith, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 1990), 95Google Scholar; Orme, Nicholas, Medieval children (New Haven and London, 2001), 5–10 Google Scholar. Hugh Cunningham in his Children and childhood in Western society since 1500 (London and New York, 1995), 30Google Scholar, comments: ‘Medievalists never seem to tire of proving Ariès to be wrong.’
15 See Forsyth, Ilene H., ‘Children in early medieval art: ninth through twelfth centuries’, Journal of Psychohistory 4 (1976), 31–70 Google ScholarPubMed; Oosterwijk, Sophie, ‘The medieval child: an unknown phenomenon?’, in Harris, Stephen J. and Grigsby, Bryon L. eds., Misconceptions about the Middle Ages (New York and London, 2008), 230–5Google Scholar, here 231–2. Orme's Medieval children is well-illustrated. See 165–6 for his discussion of images of play in illuminated manuscripts and book engravings.
16 Burton, ‘Looking forward from Ariès?’, 209–10. See also Calvert, Karin, Children in the house: the material culture of early childhood 1600–1900 (Boston, 1992), 10–11 Google Scholar. Similarly, Wilson in ‘The infancy of the history of childhood’, 144 argues in the context of printed material that Ariès confused attitudes with sources. Orme, Medieval children, 9 makes a related point.
17 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 33–4.
18 Ibid., 42, ch. 5: ‘From Immodesty to Innocence’.
19 Burton, ‘Looking forward from Ariès?’, 211. See also Oosterwijk, ‘The medieval child’, 233; Peter Fuller, ‘Uncovering childhood’, in Hoyles, Martin ed., Changing childhood (London, 1979), 71–108 Google Scholar, here 85–6.
20 See also Forsyth, ‘Children in early medieval art’, 34, 36.
21 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 101. A copy of the print is in the British Museum, 1895,0122.233.
22 Steinberg, Leo, The sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in modern oblivion (London, 1984)Google Scholar.
23 Burton, ‘Looking forward from Ariès?’, 215. For his discussion of Ariès’s use of religious art more broadly, see 211–15, especially his discussion of changes in the iconography of the nativity. Also see Higonnet, Anne, Pictures of innocence: the history and crisis of ideal childhood (London, 1998), 17–19 Google Scholar; and Cunningham, Children and childhood, 31–2.
24 For his discussion of the putto, see Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 41–2. For criticism, see Burton, ‘Looking forward from Ariès?’, 215; Steward, New child, 17; Higonnet, Pictures of innocence, 17–18. For a slightly different take, see Schorsch, Anita, Images of childhood: an illustrated social history (New York, 1979), 13–14 Google Scholar.
25 See, for example, Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 36, 335, 380–5.
26 Ibid., 346–7.
27 For useful overviews, see Westermann, Mariët, ‘After iconography and iconoclasm: current research in Netherlandish art, 1566–1700’, Art Bulletin 84, 2 (2002), 351–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Franits, Wayne, ‘Introduction’, in Franits, Wayne ed., Looking at seventeenth-century Dutch art: realism reconsidered (Cambridge, 1997), 1–7 Google Scholar.
28 Langmuir, Erika, Imagining childhood (New Haven and London, 2006), 178–81Google Scholar. For another case, see the extensive discussions of Pieter Bruegel's Children's games in, for example, Hindman's, Sandra ‘Pieter Bruegel's Children's games, folly and chance’, Art Bulletin 63, 3 (1981), 447–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snow, Edward, ‘“Meaning” in children's games: on the limitations of the iconographic approach to Bruegel’, Representations 2 (Spring 1983), 26–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schama, Simon, The embarrassment of riches: an interpretation of Dutch culture in the Golden Age (London, 1987), 497–503Google Scholar; Langmuir, Imagining childhood, 155–6.
29 Durantini, Mary Frances, The child in seventeenth-century Dutch painting (Ann Arbor, 1983), 92, 93Google Scholar.
30 Ibid., 114. The Dou is at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
31 Franits, Wayne, ‘Review of Mary Frances Durantini's The child in seventeenth-century Dutch painting ’, Art Bulletin 67, 4 (1985), 695–700 Google Scholar.
32 Schama, Embarrassment of riches, 484.
33 Ibid., ch. 7, here 495.
34 Ibid., 496.
35 Ibid., 512.
36 Wilson, ‘The infancy of the history of childhood’, 146, 151.
37 Baxandall, Michael, Painting and experience in fifteenth-century Italy: a primer in the social history of style, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1988 [orig. pub. 1972]), 52Google Scholar.
38 Schorsch, Images of childhood, 88. See also 13. This book reiterates many of Ariès’s arguments.
39 Pollock, Linda, Forgotten children: parent-child relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983), 46Google Scholar, emphasis added.
40 Wilson, ‘The infancy of the history of childhood’, 145. See also 139, 146 for his critique. Vann, Richard T. in ‘The youth of Centuries of childhood ’, History and Theory 21, 2 (1982), 279–97, here 295CrossRefGoogle Scholar, raises some issues about Wilson's analysis, but agrees that ‘Ariès sometimes lapses into an unreflective documentary positivism, in which the conventions of representation in the past, especially in its iconography, are neglected’.
41 Langmuir, Imagining childhood, 10, 13.
42 Ibid., 14.
43 Ibid., 34. On Aby Warburg, see, for example, Gombrich, E. H., Aby Warburg: an intellectual biography, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1986)Google Scholar; and Feretti, S., Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: symbol, art and history (New Haven and London, 1989)Google Scholar.
44 Steward, New child, 82. Joanne Bailey has commented on this divide in ‘Reassessing parenting’, 209–10; and Parenting in England 1760–1830: emotion, identity and generation (Oxford, 2012), 14Google Scholar.
45 Cunningham, Children and childhood, 32.
46 Ibid., 1–3.
47 Bailey, Parenting in England, 8.
48 Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, 95.
49 Jordanova, Ludmilla, ‘New worlds for children in the eighteenth century: problems of historical interpretation’, History of the Human Sciences 3, 1 (1990), 69–83, here 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
50 See Retford, Kate, ‘The evidence of the conversation piece: Thomas Bardwell's The Broke and Bowes Families (1740)’, Cultural and Social History 7, 4 (2010), 493–510 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
51 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 36–41, here 38.
52 Ibid., 39–41.
53 Ibid., 48. The use of pictures to provide information about such matters underpins Calvert's Children in the house.
54 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 48–9, 380.
55 Ibid., 44.
56 For Lawrence's portraits of children, see Pointon, Marcia, ‘“Charming little brats”: Lawrence's portraits of children’, in Albinson, Cassandra, Funnell, Peter and Peltz, Lucy eds., Thomas Lawrence: regency power and brilliance (New Haven and London, 2010), 55–81 Google Scholar.
57 Plumb, J. H., ‘The new world of children in eighteenth-century England’, Past and Present 67, 1 (1975), 64–95, here 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Jordanova, ‘New worlds for children’, 69–83 for a critique of Plumb.
58 Shawe-Taylor, Desmond, The Georgians: eighteenth-century portraiture and society (London, 1990), 203–7Google Scholar.
59 Steward, New child, 17.
60 Ibid., 19–21. See also 91–2 for this portrait.
61 Barker, Emma, ‘Imaging childhood in eighteenth-century France: Greuze's Little Girl with a Dog ’, Art Bulletin 91, 4 (2009), 426–45, here 426, 442, n. 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar. She notes Kayser, Christine ed., l'enfant chéri au siècle des lumières (Paris, 2003)Google Scholar as an exception to this. Also, Carol Duncan provided a reading of French family portraiture heavily based on Ariès in ‘Happy mothers and other new ideas in French art’, Art Bulletin 55, 4 (1973), 570–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the relationship of British portraiture and Rousseau, see Higonnet, Pictures of innocence, 26–7, Steward, New child, 83, 91ff, 109, and especially Shawe-Taylor, Georgians, 188–97.
62 Wright, Amina et al. , Pictures of innocence: portraits of children from Hogarth to Lawrence (Bath, 2005)Google Scholar.
63 Higonnet, Pictures of innocence, intro., esp. 9, and ch. 1.
64 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 322–3, 339.
65 Steward, New child, 24. Also see 19.
66 Higonnet, Pictures of innocence, 17. This is also in the Royal Collection.
67 Fuller, ‘Uncovering childhood’, 77–8; Langmuir, Imagining childhood, ch. 8.
68 Brilliant, Richard, Portraiture (London, 1991), 11Google Scholar.
69 A point made by Langmuir, Imagining childhood, 198 and particularly well by Fuller, ‘Uncovering childhood’, 78–9, 88. See also Martin Postle in Pictures of innocence, 9.
70 For details of both this portrait and the pendant of Frances Crewe, see Mannings, David and Postle, Martin, Sir Joshua Reynolds: a complete catalogue of his paintings (New Haven and London, 2000), 153Google Scholar, nos. 446 and 449; Postle, Martin, Sir Joshua Reynolds: the creation of celebrity (London, 2005), 208–11Google Scholar; Penny, Nicholas ed., Reynolds (London, 1986), 269–70; Shawe-Taylor, Georgians, 213–7Google Scholar.
71 Reynolds’s Age of innocence, c. 1788, Tate Britain, significantly, is used on the front cover of and as a starting point for discussion in Higonnet's Pictures of innocence.
72 The cartoon, ink and watercolour, c. 1536–1537, is at the National Portrait Gallery.
73 I owe this point to Adeline Mueller. The joke would not have worked so well in a previous period, in which children typically wore smaller versions of adult costumes.
74 See Hallett's, Mark recent analysis of the artist in Reynolds: portraiture in action (New Haven and London, 2014)Google Scholar.
75 Walpole, Horace, Anecdotes of painting in England, 4 vols. (London, 1827), IV, xiiiGoogle Scholar.
76 Hone's The Conjuror (1775), is now in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. See Butlin, Martin, ‘An eighteenth-century art scandal: Nathaniel Hone's The Conjuror ’, The Connoisseur 174, 699 (1970), 1–9 Google Scholar; and John Newman, ‘Reynolds and Hone: The Conjuror unmasked’, in Penny ed., Reynolds, 344–54.
77 For Reynolds’s views on ‘borrowing’, see especially Reynolds, Joshua, Discourses on art, ed. Wark, Robert R. (New Haven and London, 1997)Google Scholar, Discourse VI, 106–7.
78 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 39; Johnson, Dorothy, ‘Engaging identity: portraits of children in late eighteenth-century European art’, in Müller, Anja ed., Fashioning childhood in the eighteenth century: age and identity (Ashgate, 2006), 101–15, here 102Google Scholar.
79 Steward, New child, 25, 88; Pointon, Marcia, Hanging the head: portraiture and social formation in eighteenth-century England (New Haven and London, 1993), 179Google Scholar. Also see Johnson, ‘Engaging identity’, 103.
80 Pointon, Marcia, ‘Portrait painting as a business enterprise in London in the 1780s’, Art History 7 (1984), 187–205, here 200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 For sensibility, see Barker-Benfield, G. J., The culture of sensibility: sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago and London, 1992)Google Scholar; Todd, Janet, Sensibility: an introduction (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Mullan, John, Sentiment and sociability: the language of feeling in the eighteenth century (Oxford, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
82 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile, ou, de l'education (Paris, 1762)Google Scholar and Emilius; or, an essay on education (London, 1763)Google ScholarPubMed. See Jimack, Peter, Rousseau: Emile (London, 1983)Google Scholar. See also Bloch, Jean, Rousseauism and education in eighteenth-century France (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; and Cranston, Maurice, The noble savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754–1762 (Chicago, 1991)Google Scholar.
83 For an example of a reading of eighteenth-century images of children and the family, which grounds developments in the publication of Emile, see Shawe-Taylor, Georgians, 188–97. For the significance of John Locke's work, see Ezell, M. J. M., ‘John Locke's images of childhood: early eighteenth-century response to Some thoughts concerning education ’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 17 (1983/4), 139–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Locke's writings, see Axtell, James L. ed., The educational writings of John Locke (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar. See also Coveney, Peter, The image of childhood: the individual and society: a study of the theme in English literature (Harmondsworth, 1967)Google Scholar; Ferguson, Frances, ‘Reading morals: Locke and Rousseau on education and inequality’, Representations 6 (1984), 66–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hardyment, Christina, Dream babies: child care from Locke to Spock (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar.
84 For ideals of parenthood, see Retford, Kate, The art of domestic life: family portraiture in eighteenth-century England (New Haven and London, 2006)Google Scholar, chs. 3, 4; Bailey, Parenting in England; Bailey, Joanne, ‘Family relationships’, in Foyster, Elizabeth and Marten, James eds., A cultural history of childhood and family in the age of enlightenment (Oxford and New York, 2010), 15–31 Google Scholar.
85 The London Chronicle (29 April 1784): an anonymous review of Portraits of a Lady and Child, exhibited at the Royal Academy that year, no. 58. There is some uncertainty as to the identity of the sitters in this portrait: see Whitley, W. T., Artists and their friends in England, 1700–1799, 2 vols. (London and Boston, 1928), II, 391Google Scholar.
86 Pointon, Hanging the head, 178.
87 Graves, Algernon, The Royal Academy of Arts: a complete dictionary of contributors, 4 vols. (London, 1970)Google Scholar, III, 273. Its presence was noted in The Public Advertiser (25 April 1776) – without comment unfortunately.
88 Published 23 January 1776. See British Museum, Aa,10.7.
89 Anon, ., The ear-wig, or, an old woman's remarks on the present exhibition of pictures of the Royal Academy (London, 1781), 11Google Scholar; The Public Advertiser (28 April 1774); The Public Advertiser (1 May 1781).
90 The Whitehall Evening Post (3 May 1787). Reynolds’s A Child's Portrait in Different Views: ‘Angel's Heads’ is now at Tate Britain. See Retford, Art of domestic life, ch. 3.
91 Wilson, ‘The infancy of the history of childhood’, 132. Also see Cunningham, Children and childhood, 30.
92 Ariès, Centuries of childhood (1973), 32.
93 Ibid., 33, 34.
94 Wilson, ‘The infancy of the history of childhood’, esp. 147–51.
95 Jordanova, ‘New worlds for children’, 79. See also 69–70.
96 Pointon, Hanging the head, 177.
97 Barker, ‘Imagining childhood’, 432, quoting Watelet's L'Art de Peindre (1760).
98 See, for example, Abbé du Bos, Critical reflections on poetry, painting and music, 3 vols. (London, 1748), I, 321–2; Daniel Webb, Inquiry into the beauties of painting (1760), i.
99 See Joanne Bailey on the agency of visual culture in this regard: Parenting in England, 13.
100 A payment of 100 guineas, ‘Mr Crewe, for his Son’, is recorded in Reynolds’s Ledger, 14 February 1777. See Cormack, Malcolm, ‘The ledgers of Sir Joshua Reynolds’, Walpole Society 42 (1970), 148 Google Scholar.
101 Unfortunately, there is no precise information about the sittings, as Reynolds’s Pocket Books for 1774–1776 are missing.
102 See Wendorf, Richard, Sir Joshua Reynolds: the painter in society (London, 1996), 127–8Google Scholar. Northcote, James, Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1813)Google Scholar; Northcote, James, Supplement to the memoirs of the life, writings, discourses and professional works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1815)Google Scholar; Northcote, James, The life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 2 vols., 2nd edn (London, 1819)Google Scholar.
103 See Valentine Green's print after this portrait, His Grace The Duke of Bedford with his Brothers Lord John Russell, Lord Willm. Russell, & Miss Vernon (1778), British Museum, 1902,1011.2267.
104 The portrait of the Marlborough family, 1777–1779, is at Blenheim Palace. For this portrait, see Hallett, Mark, ‘A monument to intimacy: Joshua Reynolds’s The Marlborough Family ’, Art History 31, 5 (2008), 691–720 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Retford, Art of domestic life, 215–29.
105 Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 210.
106 See Bailey, Parenting in England, 39–42; and Woods, Robert, Children remembered: responses to untimely death in the past (Chicago, 2012)Google Scholar.
107 Bailey, Parenting in England, 8, 14, 42 and passim.
