Doing it Differently

By Drew Pugliese

Gender, surprisingly, occupies a liminal space in folk portraits of children. Social conventions from about 1800 to 1865, when the genre was at its peak, often make discerning the gender of the young sitter difficult. Specifically, girls and boys in the nineteenth century donned similar hairstyles, clothing, and jewelry throughout their youth, a circumstance that necessitated the inclusion of thematic signifiers to establish the distinction between masculine and feminine. The gendered markers used to delineate male from female reveal much about nineteenth-century notions of gender.

Ammi Phillips’s paired Boy in Red and Girl in Red are exemplary of these paradigms. Because the dress worn by the male subject is identical to that of his female counterpart, the props are crucial clues as to the genders of the sitters. The boy’s hammer is suggestively placed to both indicate the phallus and connote noise and control, qualities deemed unfeminine at the time. By contrast, the girl holds ripe strawberries over her womb, portending her future fertility. The props in both images not only help distinguish male and female but also reveal the enduring binaries of the time—the agency afforded to the male sitter by his phallic implement is wholly absent from Girl in Red, reflecting socially determined distinctions common during the nineteenth century.

Pets, frequent companions of children depicted by folk portraitists, were also determinants of gender. Pieter Vanderlyn’s early Boy with Dog and the later Girl with Cat by an unknown artist both show their subjects next to different animals, each with gendered associations. Larger and harder to control, dogs were considered appropriate for boys, whereas girls were often pictured with cats, their smaller and more interior foil.

Background and setting were also coded. Boys were commonly depicted outside, in landscapes. Henry Mosler’s Charles Henry Spitzner as a Young Child, painted by an academic artist, adopts the convention often seen in folk paintings of showing its male subject out-of-doors. Although the young boy is, like the subject of Boy in Red, not yet “breeched” (that is, he still wears the dress of a young child and has not graduated to pants), his placement outside implies his sex. Similarly, Erastus Salisbury Field’s Josiah B. Woods Jr. situates the young boy before an expansive landscape. When a girl is, less commonly, pictured in nature, it is often in a garden, suggesting fertility, as in Girl with Basket of Flowers by an unidentified artist.

Despite these well-established conventions, some portraits lacked obvious gendered markers. For example, in Ammi Phillips’s Henrietta Dorr, one in a series of nine portraits of the family painted from 1814 to 1815, the gender of the young sitter is ambiguous—her gesture and prop are identical to that of her brother Robert, also pictured by Phillips.

Works Consulted

Held, Robin. “Little Women, Little Men: Folk Art Portraits of Children from the Fenimore Art Museum.” Seattle: Frye Museum, accessed August 9, 2021, https://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/68/.
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.
Yunginger, Jennifer A. Is She or Isn't He?: Identifying Gender in Folk Portraits of Children. Massachusetts: Heritage Plantation of Sandwich, 1995.