ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the converging and often competing ideas of childhood inform a popular category in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century European portraiture – namely, the portrait of the child depicted independently from the family and the adult world. It explores what the images reveal about identity, personality and the developing idea of the childhood self in the context of the cultural understanding of the child in Europe around 1800. The widespread commissioning of children’s portraits by aristocrats as well as the wealthier bourgeoisie is truly extraordinary in a period in which infant and childhood mortality was very high. A child’s portrait stands as a testament to the important historical position of a child within the family, documents a child within the family biography and bears witness to a family’s love for its child.
