Great Expectations: An Overview
Aristocratic Children in European Portraiture
A Spanish collection's Old Master paintings explore childhood in "Great Expectations: Aristocratic Children in European Portraiture" at the Columbus Museum of Art.
Forty Old Master paintings from Mallorca, Spain's Fundación Yannick y Ben Jakober provide fascinating insight into one chapter of the history of childhood in Great Expectations: Aristocratic Children in European Portraiture (February 15-June 8, 2008). At Ohio's Columbus Museum of Art, impressive portraits illustrate the lives of royal and noble children and adolescents from the 16th through 19th Centuries.
Privilege and Portraiture
Great Expectations... describes the aristocratic youth of Europe from the Renaissance through the Romantic period. Among the rare portraits on view are those of England's Edward VI (r. 1547-1553) and Charles I (r. 1625-1649), France's Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) and Louis XV (r. 1715-1774) and Spain's Charles II (r. 1665-1700). These works serve as a vivid visual tableau of the artists' privileged subjects in their minority, a subject frequently overlooked by art historians.
Edward VI
The son of Tudor England's King Henry VIII (1509-1547) and his third of six wives, Jane Seymour (1507/08-1537), who died of complications following childbirth, Edward VI was the Reformation monarch's sole male successor. He ascended the throne at nine years of age. His image was recorded in numerous engravings and one sensitive rendering as an infant by accomplished court painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98-1543).
Relatively few portraits of Edward VI exist because of his untimely death from tuberculosis at 16. The Full-length Portrait of King Edward VI (ca. 16th-17th Centuries) was painted, perhaps posthumously, by an anonymous English artist. In this princely portrayal, the youth stands in a dark interior, partially illuminated by sunlight from an open window. Befitting his social status, he's attired in adult finery with a fanciful feathered cap.
Louis XIV
France's absolutist Sun King, Louis XIV, was eclipsed as a child by the influence of his mother and regent, Anne of Austria (1601-1666), and Cardinal Mazarin (1602-1661), the Queen Consort's wily and powerful adviser. The Portrait of Louis XIV with His Brother Philippe d'Orléans (ca. 1642) by Charles Beaubrun (1604-1692) depicts the benign youngsters seated separately, the future French ruler softly petting a bird held by his infant sibling Philippe (1640-1701). The pair's androgynous appearance is attributable to children of both sexes having been dressed in skirts until the age of seven, customary in Baroque Europe but unusual to the modern eye.
The preservation of inheritance lines was paramount to many early modern European royal and noble families. Great Expectations: Aristocratic Children in European Portraiture examines aristocratic children's privileged lives and the fates that their parents determined for them, often before birth.
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