#children
Art the community tagged “children” — see what people make of it.
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Boy on a Ram by Francisco Goya, 1786
This wasn't made to hang on a wall at all, apparently — it's a full-size design for a tapestry, painted so the king's weavers had something to copy. The set it belonged to went into a palace dining room. Cheerful stuff to eat your lunch under, I suppose.
Erisava: It sure looks like tapestry design.
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Children's Games by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1560
Historians have reportedly counted somewhere close to ninety separate games hidden in this one board - tug of war, leapfrog, hoop-rolling, plus a few nobody's been able to name for sure.
Erisava: There's too much happening for one painting - like a hundred stories weaved together.
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Alba Madonna by Raphael, 1510
This one has had an odd trip: it belonged to the Russian imperial collection at one point, and the Soviet government sold it off in the 1930s to raise cash — that's apparently how it ended up in Washington.
Erisava: A cross is a heavy thing to hand a baby to hold.
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Christ Blessing the Children by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1626
This one actually hangs in a church in Rome, from what I can find — Sant'Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso — despite popping up in art databases like a museum piece.
Erisava: The hand resting on that kid's head is what gets me about this one.
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Pastoral Repast by François Boucher, 1769
By the time this was made, critics had started turning on this sort of thing — Diderot went after it in print, supposedly, for being pretty and false. Buyers carried on wanting it regardless.
Erisava: Is this sweet, or is it selling me something?
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Don Manuel Osorio de Zuniga by Francisco Goya, 1787
The bird has a little card in its beak with the painter's own name on it — supposedly that was his way of signing it. People who've studied it reckon the cats and the caged birds are about how quickly a child's world can turn, though that might be a lot to hang on a family commission.
Erisava: It's meant to be sweet, I think, but those cats put me off it.
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Sleeping Boy by Maria Kudasheva, 2021
I found next to nothing on this one — not who asked for it, or why it's a boy asleep on a pile of books. If anyone knows the story, I'd love to hear it.
Erisava: Asleep on a pile of books with a seagull on his head. Honestly, I am lost.
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The Happy Mother by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1760
Cosy family scenes — nurseries, mothers, kids and dogs underfoot — seem to have become a big fashion in France around this time, a swerve from the flirting-in-gardens pictures the same painters had been selling. This one looks to have been left in a rough, sketchy state, though whether that was deliberate or just where he stopped I couldn't find out.
Erisava: Not sure which one is the mother and why she's happy.
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Pink and Blue by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1881
The banking family who commissioned it were, by most accounts, slow to pay and stuck it somewhere out of the way once they had it — supposedly he complained about the whole business in letters for years afterwards. Portraits like this were bread-and-butter money for him while the paintings he actually wanted to make weren't selling.
Erisava: Those dresses have had more work put into them than the two girls have.
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A Visit to the Nursery by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1775
Scenes of an ordinary household became fashionable late on — no gods, no mythology, just a room at night. There's a long-running muddle about which version is which: it was matched for years to a picture sold at auction in the 1780s until, according to Wikipedia, a closer match surfaced in a collection in Estonia around 2009.
Erisava: Nice to look at, but it's all a bit posed — and that baby's the size of a toddler.