This page is a map of eight guides on how painters recorded a human life, in five stages: childhood, motherhood and pregnancy, marriage, old age and death. Each stage opens onto its own list of paintings, from Hogarth's Graham children to Courbet's village funeral, with the story behind the best known works.
Most of these pictures were ordered by someone with a reason. Families paid for portraits of their children, churches for Madonnas, couples for wedding records, and towns for funerals worth remembering. Together they make a record of ordinary life that runs back centuries.
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The sweetest picture of childhood on this page is also the saddest. William Hogarth's The Graham Children, painted in 1742, shows several children in a bright room, dressed in their best, and nothing in it looks like grief.
Yet the youngest child, a boy named Thomas, had already died while Hogarth was working on the picture. The National Gallery in London, which owns it, says his death may be the reason the portrait was commissioned, and that the clock on the table, which shows about a quarter to two, may mark the hour he died. The museum words this carefully, because the painting itself says nothing and the commission is only presumed. It points out that the flowers and fruit beside the baby's carriage are a memento mori.
The four other stages hold stories just as unexpected, from a wedding picture that works like a signed witness statement to a village funeral painted on the scale of a history painting.
What You'll Discover
What Hogarth painted into a children's portrait.
Why a woman without children painted mothers.
What Van Eyck wrote above the mirror.
What the painter refused to soften.
Why a village funeral got such a huge canvas.