#children

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.