The New Child explores artistic representations of childhood and family life in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, the ways in which these images conveyed social values, and the evolution of these images over the period. The Georgian period is critical, for it saw the birth of modern ideas of childhood--in many respects the development of Locke's and Rousseau's ideas on children--and firmly moved the child to the center of the family unit for the first time. It is also the first time that children fully occupied the artistic imagination and are depicted engaged in the widest range of activity. The sheer number of such images is extraordinary, expecially in England where the rise of Europe's first true middle class encouraged artistic interest in family issues.
This exhibition makes clear the powerful role that visual images played in changing popular attitudes toward children and the family. Further, the emotional content of works depicting children suggest that the roots of Romanticism can be found quite early in the eighteenth century. Special attention is paid to the question of the transposition of adult characteristics and behavior onto children including suggestions of the child's sexuality and even of sexual abuse.
Many of the works selected for inclusion in the exhibition are noted masterworks by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Wright of Derby, while others are less well-known. Rarely has the examination of these images extended beyond their stylistic elements to include their social meaning. Images are selected from a wide range of paintings, drawings, engravings, and book illustrations to address the question of influence on various socio-economic levels and the popular dissemination of images and the values they convey. The exhibition is organized thematically with sections devoted to portraiture, childbirth and nursing, education, play, and death. These sections pose, and try to answer, various questions: what is the nature of the child? what is the parent's proper role? what were the limits on representing children and how did they change?