Children in art and spectatorship

One of my Paris rituals is to visit the Louvre on my final evening there and spend an hour with my much-beloved, machine-sized nineteenth-century paintings. I’m always surprised by certain details I hadn’t noticed before, such as the dark tonality of Girodet’s Burial of Atala or the flatness of certain passages in Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. This time, I was struck by the sheer beauty of David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women. The canvas has a freshness to it that makes it seem recently painted, all of the vignettes work cohesively, the bodies are magnificently articulated, and the facture is simply marvelous. I’ve always loved this work for its pro-woman possibilities, but this time, I was especially taken by all of the children in the painting. There are a number of babies and toddlers here, many of whom are looking out at the viewer with a moving plaintiveness or curiosity. While much significant work has been done on the women in this painting, little has been said about the children. I took a couple dozen photographs of all of the children I could find in the painting. Much has been done with children as subjects in art (and I’m particularly interested in how they are used as focalizers), but I also think something needs to be done with the whole matter of children as spectators. Contemporary accounts of the exhibition and reception of this painting remarked on the presence of women and children–mostly to express dismay that they were exposed to the indecent (read: male) nudity in the work. Other texts of the Revolutionary period attest to children’s involvement in the visual arts.

Conversation topic: What is your favorite work of art featuring a child and why?