Few of the children on this page had any say in the matter. A pose held for a minute at best, and the painter had to catch a laugh or a sulk before it vanished. Some of these pictures then took on a life of their own, and one followed its young sitter into the navy, all the way to the rank of admiral.
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How These Were Chosen
A child in a painting could carry more than a likeness: a family's heir, an idea of innocence, a lesson about how short life is, or simply a face caught in the middle of a laugh. That is why painters kept coming back to sitters who could not sit still.
The rule here is simple. Each painting has one or more children as its main subject, shown doing something that can be named: posing, playing, eating, watching, sulking. Religious children, from the Christ Child to the winged babies of church ceilings, are left out.
Some of the twelve are posed for a role, as heirs to a throne or as types for a print. Others are caught in a game, a meal or a mood, and a few sit right on the line between the two.
12. Frans Hals, Laughing Boy (around 1625)
Out of a round wooden panel about the size of a dinner plate, a boy laughs, his hair sticking out in every direction and his eyes narrowed by the grin. Frans Hals painted him in Haarlem, in the Dutch Republic, around 1625. At the time Hals earned his living with portraits of the city's merchants and militia officers, and in the 1620s people who paid for a portrait almost never asked to be shown laughing.
This boy was never a client. His name is not known, and the panel is what the Dutch called a tronie, a word that simply means a face. Painters used it for head studies of a type or an expression, an old man, a soldier, a laughing child, made without a sitter paying for a likeness.
That freedom gave Hals a chance at one of the hardest expressions to paint, since a laugh slides so easily into a grimace. He painted the boy from a live model and worked alla prima, laying each stroke into paint that was still wet.
With a child, that speed was the method itself. A laugh lasts a few seconds, and no boy can hold one through a long sitting. The proof sits in the middle of the face, where the bridge of the nose is a single well placed stroke of white.
At a Glance
Artist: Frans Hals (1582 or 1583 to 1666)
Painted: Around 1625
Medium: Oil on panel
Size: 30.45 cm in diameter (12 in)
Where to see it: Mauritshuis, The Hague
11. Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878)
A little girl lies sprawled across a big armchair covered in blue patterned fabric, in a lacy dress with a tartan sash and bow, matching socks and shiny black shoes, while a small dog sleeps in the matching chair opposite.
Mary Cassatt, an American from Pennsylvania who had first come to Paris in 1866, painted her there in 1878, at a time when a well dressed little girl was expected to sit properly. Only Cassatt's name goes with the picture, yet she was not the only painter to work on it.