Fathers (and Mothers) of Man
Childhood, despite the importance it was newly afforded during the nineteenth century, remained short lived. American children were dependent on their parents for only a brief period by today’s standards. Yet, while a family’s role in a young person’s life was transitory, folk art from the period reveals its abiding emotional and social centrality. Amid the shifting landscape of American life during these years the family was a stable point, charged with the responsibility of conveying traditional values to young adults who were considered the future stalwarts of the nascent republic.
Both Father and Son, The Walker Family, Middle Haddam, Connecticut and Mother and Daughter, The Walker Family, Middle Haddam, Connecticut build upon this conviction. Each of the paintings captures the Walker children in a didactic moment. Father Walker holds an open book in his hand, as if about to instruct his son, who stands beside him with a small dog. Mother and daughter pose in a complementary composition. The boy’s carefully tailored skeleton suit and the girl’s Empire-revival-style gown, similar to her mother’s, connote the advent of their adolescence. No longer donning the gender-neutral dresses seen in other early-life portraits, the children are positioned both intellectually and sartorially for their rapidly approaching public lives.
The Convent Garden is a picture that may have been completed by a young girl during her classical instruction. The watercolor depicts the type of private school young girls attended during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which prepared female students to be self-sufficient members of the domestic sphere as wives and mothers. Several elements of this rendering suggest the hand of a schoolgirl artist: the four tall trees in the background at the left are made with short, gradated strokes of color reminiscent of the threads stitched in needlework, while the jagged border outlining the two large trees in the foreground is reminiscent of stencil, or theorem, paintings of early instruction. The Convent Garden also confers a subtle moral message. The watering can, rake, and shovel in the lower right convey a sense of activity interrupted. In this way, the painting expresses the care, love, and patience required to cultivate the verdant plants, attributed both to the gardener and, metaphorically, the convent school, where young girls were readied for adulthood in an environment that blossomed with knowledge and inspiration.
The formal classes in drawing and needlework that were part of a child’s curriculum at academies such as the one pictured in The Convent Garden yielded student productions that were proudly displayed in homes as symbols of the young person’s cultural refinement and intellectual achievement. This was especially true for girls. Flora, a watercolor and needlework by Sally Anne Sprague, a child of the early nineteenth century, is an example of these exercises. The image highlights her skills at both drawing in watercolor and working with a needle and thread. Sprague embellished the delicately rendered garden scene with hand-stitched details in Flora’s shoes, the garland in her hair, the decorative outlining of her green robe, and the stitching of the brown oval surround. The neoclassical scene depicted redoubles the sense of cultural refinement and the ennobling virtues of education.
Village Common, a fantastical landscape by an unknown artist—replete with an anachronistic skyscraper in the distance—seems to consummate the maturation process that the Walker Family portraits, The Convent Garden, and Flora begin, showing a breeched child venturing out into public ground, as if to portend his future social role.
Works Consulted
Archard, David. Children: Rights and Childhood. Routledge, 2014.
Heslip, Colleen Cowles, and Charlotte Emans Moore. “Catalogue of the Collection.” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 57, no. 1/2 (1998): 31–162, accessed July 26, 2021, www.jstor.org/stable/3774774.
MacLeod, Anne S. A Moral Tale: Children's Fiction and American Culture 1820–1860. Archon, 1975.
