I talk I gave for Save the Children about the way children have been represented in Western art and the way this reflects the role and status of children in society.
I start with a house altar showing Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti playing with their three daughters and end with Banksy wall art from Borodyanka, Ukraine showing a small boy throwing a grown man, they are both wearing judogi and the man is presumably Vladimir Putin.
The notes are here https://www.shafe.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/31-Children-in-Art-SCF.pdf
My talk today is children in art and I’ve selected works from the whole history of Western Art to show various aspects of childhood and all the images I’m going to show I’m going to show chronologically now the modern idea of childhood was invented in the 18th and 19th
Century and paintings like this one by John Everett Millay my first sermon helped create the modern idea of childhood and be before then children were just seen as young adults and rarely shown in art with one exception I’m going to show you over 3,000 years ago perhaps the most
Startling image I’ll be showing you today it’s this now the art of ancient Egypt is normally regarded as unchanging for 3,000 years and and mostly it was most of it was ferary Art and concerned with ceremonies to ensure the dead passed over to aru the field of reeds
Which is their or was their Paradise however there was one short 18-year period when art and Society changed radically that was the reign of Aran Aron and his wife nefatiti and they’re shown here playing with with their children this type of image was unheard of in Egyptian art before and after this brief
Period it’s difficult to describe just how unbelievable this is it’s almost as if Aran Aron Came From Another World the for example the Egyptians had hundreds of gods and goddesses and had done for a thousand years unchanged Aran arton did away with them all except for one the sun god arton shown
Here shining its Rays down on the happy family you can see Aken aren almost kissing his daughter while his wife holds another daughter on her lap while a third Strokes her cheek Aran Aron changed everything changed religion fundamentally removed the power from the powerful priests built a new city armana
From scratch changed the art but he only reigned for 18 years and a few years later three years later after his death was the reign of the now famous Pharaoh Tuten Kon and Tuten Kon reinstated all the old gods moved the capital away from arm and almost completely erased Aran Aron from
History by the way before I move on I’m sometimes asked about the elongated heads of his daughters it’s it’s believed that they are purely stylistic they’re not inherited or a genetic deformity a thousand years later we find children represented in Greek fery art this is a gravestone of Fon
Oi and N he holds the baby that reaches out to its mother and we know from the inscription the baby has just died the baby reaches out but cannot reach the mother there’s a a tinier 3mm gap between them representing the unbridgeable gap between life and death children were represented in Greek
And Roman art but mostly in ferary monuments or sometimes mythological figures like cupid like this one this is um sleeping OS the um Greek um child god of love in Roman mythology Cupid children were also sometimes shown in scenes playing with each other or or even sometimes playing with
Pets this particular statue of os sleeping is the finest example known it’s at the the met in New York there were many many rep replicas built it was very popular this particular statue in the Greek helenistic and the Roman period and the Romans often used this particular statue
Or copies of it to decorate Villas um Gardens fountains and so on so representations of children were known but not common however there is one child of course that’s represented thousands and thousands of times the Infant Jesus shown here in the ear earliest representation of the Virgin Mary shown here with the Infant
Jesus it’s um in the catacombs of Priscilla in Rome the we believe the figure on the left is the prophet barlum pointing to a star which is outside the frame here and of course there are I’m showing you here the first image of the infant Jesus but there are literally thousands
And thousands of course of images of Jesus but I just I’ll just show you just one that I’ve selected I’ve tried to select images which are a bit unexpected or a bit unusual this one is 400 years after the um previous one in the Priscilla catacombs it’s a bantine religious icon
Showing the Virgin Mary holding Jesus sitting between on the left St Theodore and on the right St George each holding martyr’s crosses there are two angels behind looking up towards God whose hand can be seen coming down from heaven top center now the interesting thing I think is that the Saints are presented
Frontally but the Angel’s heads are well modeled in three dimensions as is the the virgin’s face has a realistic appearance and this is early bantine we believe um it’s around about um 6th Century early 6th century and it’s a mixture of classical and iconic representation remember Constantinople was the capital of the
Eastern Roman Empire and they regarded themselves as continuing the classical tradition in art so it’s a combination Mary and Christ are averting their eyes they’re not looking at us directly but the Saints are staring at us and I I believe this is um represents a a a
Conduit through the Saints to Mary and through her to up to the heaven realm in other words it’s a a Lial space a Gateway from the everyday world to the spiritual world now there was another important reason for chowing children art but we need to jump forward a thousand years to
An image that you’ve probably seen many times in Hampton Court and the reason for showing the child here is succession succession to Edward Henry VII was desperate to carry on the tudah line and here that role Falls to Edward shown on his right and he has his hand resting on Edward’s
Shoulder and on the other side Edward’s mother Jane Seymour and to emphasize the importance of succession that this is about succession it was painted in 1545 roughly We Believe Jane Seymour had already been dead 8 years and his then wife was Katherine par who’s not even shown in this picture
His daughters are shown Princess Mary is on the left and Princess Elizabeth on the right now you might be wondering who the figures are lurking outside they are the CT fools the woman on the left whose attention seems to have been taken by something in the distance is probably uh Jane Fall or
Jane the fall fall to anbin Princess Mary and Katherine PA she’s in the The Garden of not not Hampton Court of um White Chapel White Hall I should say White Hall Palace and you can see a typical chuda Garden outside it’s got Square enclosure surrounded by low fences and in the
Center of each enclosure there’s a pole with the chuda colors of green and white and on top of the pole is um one of the king’s heraldic beasts and within the low fence there would be a bed of flowers if you look on the other side
The man in red hose is the King’s fool Will Summers he’s got a monkey on his head checking for lice and the inclusion of the fools shows their importance within the Royal household they were one of the few who were allowed to speak truth to power
As we would say but they still had to be careful in 1535 Henry threatened to kill Summers with his own bare hands for calling and berin a Ral which is um a term that meant [ __ ] and Princess Elizabeth a bastard but it seems that um he was forgiven because he continued to be
Henry’s fool one more um succession and I’m showing this to show the change in the representation of children this is by Anthony van djk and called the five eldest children of Charles I 1637 and it demonstrates the strength of the line of succession from Charles I the the the painting was extremely
Popular it was copied many times and it’s interesting compared with the previous painting to note the relative informality of the group compared with Edward stiff pose but van djk has still maintained the Royal status through the Sumptuous close and setting the important child here is the
One in the center Charles here he’s aged seven and he becomes Charles II and he’s shown in control of an enormous Mastiff the Mastiff had been a guard dog since Roman times and here it’s being controlled by Charles demonstrating his ability to control and therefore control the
Nation the Mastiff was actually um an immensely popular breed because it was used in what was then regarded as a sport of Bull and Bear baiting in fact it was used to the extent that the Masti at this point had become an endangered species and it’s being shown here because it’s a stateus
Symbol a rare and much desired breed um incidentally the child to the left is James here age four and not yet breached which is why he’s shown in address uh later become James II we jump forward 100 years to the reign of George II this is William hogarth’s AES
Progress the arrest and we see coming out of the sedan chair raell and he’s arriving at St James’s Palace which you can see on the left he’s squandered his fortune uh to the extent that the BFFs here are trying to arrest him but his former betrothed Sarah
Young although he rejected her is still holding out a purse trying to pay off his debts and you can see that she works as a seamstress because the box of her tools of the trade is falling down to the ground as she leaps forward pulling back the baliff and trying to
Pay off his debts but however I want to concentrate on the children though there was much poverty in London and many of the children had to fend for themselves and become adults before their time bottom right there’s seven children and the uh children were actually added in a third edition of the
Print along with the flash of lightning their street urchins fending of themselves gambling theft small scale business activities first of all the boy at the back right at the back is stealing Tom’s h Chief the two boys in front of him are playing cards but the boy wearing the
Wig is cheating as his accomplice is behind the other one looking at his cards and holding up two fingers the boy being cheated is Mercury a Mercury uh which was a boy who sold newspapers in the street and you can tell that from the horn stuck in his
Belt and and his cap reads your vote and interest Liberties the two baskets you can see on the left of center and on the right are shoe blacks baskets so that’s another way the boys can make money and there’s a third item used to make money if you
Look at the boy on the left he’s smoking a pipe reading the Farthing post which was um a gossip sheet sold cheap to avoid paying stamp Duty and in front of him there’s an inverted spirit glass and a nogging a small container so he’s selling unlicensed Spirits another way of making
Money you they’re all boys so you might wonder what opportunities there were for destitute girls in this harsh World well there were very few opportunities um other than prostitutions they had to work mostly in factories making matchboxes or sewing one in nine only one in nine
Girls worked or could could get jobs as domestic servants the Richer children were taught at home middle class children went to grammar school or a private Academy but poor children like this uh had to work to support the family often so these boys could be out on the street working
To help support their families so from poor children to loved children this is the or these are Thomas gainor’s daughters it’s called the painters daughters Chasing a Butterfly it’s um his earliest portrait of his two daughters Mary and Mar Margaret who were five and six Mary who’s the older one the six-year-old is
On the right cool poised wise restrained Margaret was impulsive and heedless of danger they’re coming out of a dark wood and the Elder Mary looks wary and constrains the impetuous Margaret who is leaping forward to try and um capture this symbol of Beauty the butterfly but is in danger of being
Pricked by one of the Thorns of the thistle that the butterfly is resting on so this symbolizes impulsiveness versus constraint and the transience of human Pleasures it demonstrates as well what we or what was then understood by the term Sensibility which in the 18th century became part of the cult of sensibility
Sensibility was associated with um an appreciation of beauty and seeing the world with a sense of wonder and a strong emotional connection an acute responsiveness towards the world and these sensitive people were thought to have finer senses and to be more aware of beauty and moral truth although it could be taken to
Excess in women if taken to excess it was called hysteria so sensibility was widely seen to be a virtue but had its physical and emotional dangers it it um laid the groundwork for an art movie movement called the Romantic Movement in art and literature this is one of a pair of
Paintings by George Morland and it makes the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor a distinction that um I think some 40 years before William Hogarth had made with his series of Prince called industry and idleness this is the miseries of idleness and you can see the idol
Husband can only provide his son with a bone to no the baby is in rags and crying the empty CK um and picture on its side suggest he’s drunk with the Imp application therefore that they only have themselves to blame for their impoverished State and a tragic fate awaits
Them on the other hand these are the deserving poor and the Comforts of Industry the hardworking husband has just come home to three wellfed children he hands his wife some coins to provide for the family their clothes are clean and untorn and the girl is holding a toy a
Doll the irony is that Morland was a notoriously heavy drinker and deta he spent his final years in data’s prison and he painted imprison he could paint these works extremely quickly and he would use them to pay off his debts get out of dea’s prison spend all of his money on drink
And buying drinks for his friends end up back in dea’s prison he eventually died of alcoholism age 41 his life uh there were so many incidents in his life it was so outrageous so unbelievable that four anecdotal biographies were written immediately after his death I turn now to school this is Thomas
Webster’s late at school to well-dressed children look in fear as they enter the school late the sister trying to hide behind her brother the earliest schools this is 1835 this was painted were associated with the church and became known as um Public Schools as they were open to the
Public the altern ative at the time was a private chor now in the chuda period charity schools emerged with the purpose of educating the poor and Edward I 6 created a system of free grammar schools in practice poor children needed to work to support their family so could rarely attend these free
Schools and then coming up to the 18th and 19th century the Society for promoting Christian knowledge founded many charity schools for the poor and this became the basis of today’s um concept of what we call primary and secondary school education and in the 19th century the Church of England sponsored most formal
Education and in fact resisted attempts by the state to provide secular education until the government insisted and provided free compulsory education towards the end of the century now this school this little village school here is probably a church of England school as the you might be thinking it’s a ragged school they were
Just getting started there were only three in 1835 when this was painted but by 1881 there were over 200 and some 300,000 children had been educated in these free so-called ragged schools and we’ve come to the 1840s known as The Hungry 40s because of their poor harvests but the situation in Ireland
Was even worse Ireland was then a part of the United Kingdom but more than a million people died of starvation in what was called the Great Famine from 1845 to 1852 and our 1 and a half million people immigrated it’s about a third of the population died or immigrated that was
Um this um has been called the Great Famine has been called the greatest social disaster of 19th century Europe uh uh an event with something like of the characteristics of a low-level nuclear attack this painting is by George Frederick watts and shows the horror of the Irish
Famine what made things worse in Ireland is that the population depended on potatoes and for good reason the potato gave the highest yield of food per acre of any crop by but in 1845 there was a blight a potato blight that destroyed the crop and got worse from year to
Year it was reported it was known about in England it was reported in The Illustrated London news for example the um artist the The Illustrated London news had an artist who toured Ireland uh reporting on what he saw and that alerted the British public to the crisis
But the government uh did nothing in fact um the real outrage was that there was enough grain being exported from Ireland throughout the famine to feed the entire population and this painting shows the effect of famine in England because um there was famine in England as as well
As Ireland it was much worse in Ireland but one of the effects of the famine in England was immigration and this shows the immigrant’s last sight of home and this is leth Hill where the artist Richard Redgrave owned a cottage and spent a lot of time there each summer and he was one
Of the pioneers of um what’s called social realist paintings paintings of the poor poor and needy um as a result of the Industrial Revolution there was widespread unemployment in the 1830s and 40s there was there were poor harvest as I’ve said and there were also Corn Laws
Which held the price of bread higher than it should have been and one result of all of this was mass immigration from Britain to the colonies and to America there was another um reason another incentive to leave and that was the discovery of gold in Australia and
America and the possibility of making a fortune and aside from gold there was the promise of farming land and higher wages in this painting the father has a carpenter’s bag so he’s um he’s got a skill described at the time by critic a Critic as a modern Joseph escaping with
His family to a new land and life but underneath you can see the family’s sadness although perhaps also hope that things will turn out better a sense of optimism the sadness is a result of leaving friends behind notice halfway down the hill there’s a boy standing
With the help of crutches he looks sad and notice that the girl is by at the top is holding up uh a a cloth her apron to her face perhaps she’s stopping herself crying her sister standing behind her is pointing to the boy so we can imagine that she’s leaving behind
The boy she loves a father is waving his hat at someone down the bottom of the hill while his Li wife looks up to him unhappy and her young daughter is has her face nestled in her lap perhaps crying immigration was often heartbreaking because of leaving one’s country and breaking personal
Relationships the workhouse this is John Brett’s Stonebreaker and we return here to the rural poor and the workhouse introduced in 1834 with the poor La Amendment act the aim of the workhouse was to reduce the cost to the rate payer of paying poor relief and the idea was
That the conditions in the workhouse would be worse than the worst conditions of working to force people to work rather than to enter the workhouse but conditions in factories were so bad that despite every effort to make conditions worse in the workhouse it turned out to be almost impossible
Possible the conditions were appalling in both factories and the workhouse and in the workhouse it gave rise to scandals reported in the Press Stone breaking was one occupation given to those in the workhouse it was Soul destroying task although uh Brett here shows what looks like a well-nourished smartly dressed boy
Accompanied by a playful dog in a sunlit beautiful setting I so it it’s difficult to know the the message he’s trying to get across this by the way is The Mole Valley and the hill the other side of the valley is Box Hill the Milestone shows London is 23 miles
Away there’s over on the right you can just about see a Railway Bridge bridge and embankment in the middle distance look and down the bottom of the hill you can see St Michael’s Church we’re we’re on the hill or just along from the hill where we now have dem’s
Vineyard and dwking is to the right and every detail of the S Valley is C captured with scientific accuracy which um John Brett was known for um John Ruskin in fact said that Brett went beyond anything the prer raites have done in terms of the detail he worked on this picture
Outdoors we know he painted a few additions in the studio the boy was modeled on his brother Edwin the Blasted tree perhaps signifies the boy’s blasted future uh but if you look on the top of the tree there’s a bird a bullfinch symbolizing the free human spirit so there’s um a mixed message
Here with the sunlight but the Blasted tree so perhaps it’s ambiguous about what the future of the boy will be switching to a very different theme fairy stories we’ve me reached the middle of the 19th century and at this time we have some of the first stories written specifically
For children although many of the early fairy stories were fairly gruesome they were actually written for adults and it all started in the 17th century with a French author Charles perau and he was one of the earliest to assemble these ancient fairy tales you may be thinking of the brothers Grim
Jacob and vilhelm uh they were later and they assembled a book of German folklore and it became extremely popular so it’s it’s better known than Charles perau this is a version of paro’s fairy tale of Red Riding Hood the illustration is by Gustaf dor published in
1862 and in the book which is available online um Red Riding Hood is only six pages long fairly short it includes three large illustrations this is one of them and in his version The Wolf meets Red Riding Hood in the woods and she innocently tells him where she’s going
And where her grandmother lives so the wolf hurries on ahead eats the grandmother and where when Red Riding Hood arrives he’s in the bed wearing her Bonnet asks her to join him in the bed which we see here then eats her and that’s the end of the story remember the original fairy
Stories were folktales passed on from adult to adult and they had a moral mean meaning which I’ll tell you in a moment just to mention that it was later the brothers Grim toned down the story and added a hunter who comes to the rescue cuts open the wolf with an axe rescues
Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother who emerge unscathed and they fill the wolf’s body with stones he a strange twist here he wakes up goes to try and drink from the well and because of the stones he falls in and drowns returning to this version but to by
Pero after commenting on her grandmother’s big arms big legs big ears and big eyes it ends with the famous lines Grandma what big teeth you have the better to eat you with and saying these words the Wicked Wolf fell upon Poor Little Red Riding Hood and ate her all
Up but what’s interesting is the story then ends with a moral which I’ll read in full because it explains what these fairy stories were actually about it was a warning to young women and it’s headed the moral children girls most of all so sweet so pretty so innocent and nice don’t listen to
Everyone you meet but if you do don’t be surprised when it’s you the wolf me to eat I say wolf as there are many kinds some seem mild mannered benign without wroth smooth and refined who follow girls from time to time these wolves are the most dangerous
Kind so as you can see it’s not actually about a wolf eating a girl it’s about a girl being seduced by a man innocence now as I said in the early uh representations of children in the early culture children were seen as small adults this idea of childhood being a
Special period of innocence and Beauty where children are cute and precious and vulnerable and need to be looked after by Vigilant adult supervision this is created in the 19th century now what we see here is John Everett mle his 5-year-old daughter Effie posing for him she’s sitting in fact on one of the
High-backed pews in All Saints Church Kingston on TS and melee hurried to paint these pews in 1862 shortly before they were removed and destroyed it was critics described this as one of the happiest works this artist has ever painted it’s my first sermon it was exhibited in 1863 and
Um the melee painted a companion piece a year later this one my second sermon exhibited at the Royal Academy A year later and interestingly in his speech at the Royal Academy banquet the Archbishop of Canterbury claimed it as a warning against the evil of lengthy sermons and drowsy discourses blaming of course the
Vicor rather than the child one critic noted everybody is rejoiced to recognized sitting in the same place as last year a little girl now dear to many a heart who then was listening in wrapped attention and both images were widely reproduced as prints and this print and many others of his work
Made him one of in fact the wealthiest artist of the 19th century just a briefly mention photography and um what’s now regarded as one of the greatest photographers of the 19th century this revolutionary work by Julia Margaret Cameron pushing the artistic boundaries of Photography before those boundaries had even been
Established incidentally she left no mark on photography in the 19th century and was only rediscovered in 1948 but has become seen as one of the leading photographers the American photographer imagin Cunningham said I’d like to see portrait photography go right back to Julia Margaret Cameron I don’t think there’s anyone better
And Getty Images commented recently Cameron’s photographic portraits are considered amongst the finest in the early history of photography she Julia Margaret Cameron only came to photography late her daughter gave her her first camera and this is the first print with which she was satisfied it’s Annie Philpot the daughter of um a local
Villager this is Bubbles by a game by John Everett Millay um by 1886 he was the most famous and wealthiest artist in the country and lived in a very grand house in Kensington it’s based on early 19 early 17th century Danish vanitas paintings um pointing out those vanites
Paintings pointed out the transience of life and that’s Illustrated here by the the plant in the background which is which is dying the broken pot in the foreground on the left and the bubble about to burst showing the shortness of life it was bought by the owner of The
Illustrated London news it was reproduced in The Illustrated London news and it was seen in that paper by the managing director of pears soap then called a and F pairs he convinced mle to give up rights to the painting um he was worried about being exploited
But he finally agreed and in fact this was the campaign and milay was happy with the campaign Barrett or Pear’s soap spent £3,000 on the campaign and there were millions of reproductions and they would hang in homes around the country the child by the way is mle’s grandson William milborn James and he
Was dogged by the image throughout his life and he became known as his nickname became bubbles although that didn’t stop him becoming an admiral a politician and an author and it wasn’t until 9 years later that this um commercial this advertisement was criticized in a novel and the artist was criticized for
Prostituting his talent and it was clear to everyone that the artist she was referring to to was melee and he defended himself by saying he’ sold the copyright so couldn’t control the use and this um novel and mle’s response aroused an argument in the art world that was
Reported in the press and then artists started to protest against this use of Fine Art and the argument continued into the 20th century about should art Fine Art be used in this way until probably the time of pop art and Andy warhole who effectively United or made it clear that there’s no distinction
Between Fine Art and mass marketing final work by melee the Boyhood of Raleigh this time capturing the world the wonders of Adventure and Discovery and this is melee Imagining the Boyhood of Raleigh who of course was one of the most celebrated explorers of the Elizabethan age he’s the boy in green
Listening with wrapped attention to the wonders of the uh the uh Sailors Adventures on sea and land it’s a genoise sailor the painting again went into print of was extremely popular it was seen as a celebration of the British Empire and our control of the Seas through the power of the ro royal
Navy the Barefoot sailor um points out across the Horizon a model ship lies on one side it’s red flag by the way is not an end sign I don’t think as it doesn’t have the small Cross of St George which was used in the Elizabethan period it’s
Probably the red flag raised to indicate a ship is about to engage in combat the boy’s expression shows their concentration we can imagine they’re thinking of the Exotic World conjured up by the Sailor and these exotic worlds are indicated by the uh wicker basket covered in exotic feathers and the two
Birds next to it behind the anchor one is a toucan from South America happy childhood I think this is a wonderful illustration it’s called three happy boys Francis Meadow Sutcliffe was an English photographer who’s spent a lot of time recording uh the everyday life of the towns folk of the seaside town of
Whitby and he was born in leads and had a basic education became a portrait photographer in tumbridge Worlds and then moved to Whitby for the rest of his life so he was a resident he lived in Whitby his father was a painter introduced him to
John Ruskin so he was known in the art world now he was a bit different he he made his he made money by taking photographs of holiday makers but regarded it as prostituting his art and so he hated the money making side and spent a lot of his own time building up
One of the most complete and revealing collections of photographs of late Victorian England Mary cassant was an American Artist but she lived much of her life in France she was a friend of Edgar dear exhibited with the impressionist often painted the social and private lives of women particularly uh with
Children she came from a wealthy family and when she moved to Paris she was chaperoned by her mother and a family friend because she was a woman she wasn’t accepted at the echol de boa and she studied privately was very highly regarded by the Impressionists but found that it was
Very difficult to get her work accepted for exhibitions because it was expected that um they would only be accepted for an exhibition if they had friends on the jurry and the way that a woman obtained friends on the jury was to flirt with the jurors which she refused to
Do uh she but she came from a wealthy background so she was financially independent and she was invited to exhibit at the impressionist exhibitions from about um the age of 44 1888 many of the Works she produced were paintings of Mother’s mother and child and her reputation today is mainly
Based on those late paintings of mother and child in fact from 1890 it was almost exclusively mother and child paintings inspired by the Italian Renaissance pictures of Madonna and child this is an unusual angle looking down on the mother and child inspired as many artists work were at the time by Japanese
Prince incidentally the authorities called on people to bathe regularly as a medical prevention to prevent the disease because chera was rampant so the mother and child here are not playing in a bath but it’s a they have serious Expressions indicating this is a a solemn even spiritual occas
It’s a bit like uh the Virgin Mary washing Christ’s feet this is Lai the life a Great Masterpiece of Picasso’s blue period Picasso said I started to paint in blue when I learned to camus’s death c car Caris cagus was um his good friend who committed suicide he’d fallen in
Love with Jermaine pisho a model and friend of both of them Picasso and casus but she wanted nothing to do with him she refused to live with him and then he took a revolver to a cafe where she was um having dinner and he shot at her but missed and
Then shot himself and killed himself he died di in hospital later that evening Picasso was then 21 he was actually living he’ gone back to Madrid he returned to Paris desperately poor suffered from depression because of his friend’s death and started painting in blue themes of misery and Poverty of the
Lower classes this painting is hard to interpret it it’s been seen in many ways the the man looks like a portrait of Carlos Aus he’s pointing to a woman and her baby uh but he close to another woman possibly the same woman Germaine is he dreaming of the future that might have been Um previously there’s an underpainting uh he painted over Picasso painted over um a bearded man um on the right and he painted this woman holding a baby why did he change it one idea is it represents sacred and profane love another is that it’s a cycle of Life
Starting with the baby then the young lover on the left then the mature woman with the baby on the right and then the old woman which is the drawing low down there’s another idea discussed by critics about this painting if you look at the man’s gesture it looks very similar to
The gesture of Christ in Kio norly May Tanger 1525 a Latin means do not touch me but is better translated from the Greek cease holding on to me in the sense of let go both um now that he’s purely spiritual and so no physical contact is possible uh sees holding on to me
Mentally let me go this is after first World War The Artist is Kathy Kitz and shows the effect of the first world war and children her son died in the first world war and she worked with otod dicks creating anti-war propaganda she wanted to show the horrors of War at a time
When uh pro-war sentiment was growing in Germany after the war she finished her three most famous portraits or posters including this one Germany’s children starving and it was the image of starving children in Germany that inspired eglantine Jeb to found save the children in April 1919 there was an Allied Naval blockade
To prevent food reaching Germany and um Austria Hungary and the Ottoman Empire and that blockade is estimated to resulted in the death by starvation of half to 3/4 of a million civilians a 100,000 of them died of starvation after the war had ended because the Allies refused to remove the
Blockade Jeb’s save the children appeal was suddenly and dramatically successful despite the fact that she was raising money for the former enemy the public donated over a million pounds and she got the block PA raised and during the 1920s she devoted herself to save the children and died in 1928 aged only
52 this is Hilda unity and dolls by Stanley Spencer painted three months after his divorce from Hilda and it captures her grief she’s not looking at us but her and his daughter 7-year-old Unity is staring straight out at us maybe challenging us with her gaze and her
Recriminations but the the the dolls are interesting the eyess dolls see heighten the painting sense of loss and dislocation art critics have discussed for years the idea that Unity poked out the eyes of the doll um in fact we now know that’s not true because one of the Dolls Golden
Slumbers Sonia Rose it was called was shown at the Henley literary Festival in 2015 by a then 85y old Unity she still had the doll the doll still had working undamaged eyes that opened and closed so it Spencer he’ painted the eyes of both dolls’s black sockets perhaps reinforcing the piercing accusing stare
Of his daughter unity in contrast we see here a happy family this is Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want 1943 he’s best known picture of a happy family in America and it’s uh the third of what he called the four Freedom series of paintings and those Four Freedoms were
Inspired by a State of the Union Address by Franklin D Roosevelt in 1941 they were the freedom of speech freedom of religion freedom from want and Freedom From Fear and Rosevelt said the third is Freedom from Want which translated into World terms means economic understandings which will secure to
Every Nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world so in those days America saw its goal was to bring those Four Freedoms to the whole world and in fact they became Incorporated in the charter of the United Nations a different representation of a holiday
Scene this is called The Last Resort it’s one of 40 photographs taken in New Brighton which is a a beach suburb of Liverpool and what Martin par is doing is showing uh how leisure time is spent the a lot of his he shows different leisure activities a lot of
Them on the beach he likes recording the beach the beach is always going to be an integral part of what I do it just goes on and on he says incidentally at New Brighton most of the Golden Sands had gone in the 1960s because of tidal changes in the
Mery and there was a lot of concrete and large pieces of hoage machinery and people had to put towels down on the concrete um because there was no sand and as an alternative to deck chairs it was um an area which was used by the economically deprived working class of Liverpool and
Par shows their life warts and all it it was criticized at the time some critics thought it was cruel and vois in fact PA said it’s very easy to look back and be nostalgic thinking that everything was better in the good old days well it wasn’t it just evolves
Adoration of the cage fighters is the first in a series of six tapestries called the vanity of small differences by Grayson Perry based on Andre mata’s the Adoration of the Shepherds a 15th century painting and the series concerns social mobility and it’s um also a 21st century response to hogar
Rake’s progress of the 18th century and Perry has reversed the story and tells the life of Tim rawell rather than Tom rawell this is the first tapestry of the series and in this Tim is still a baby reaching out to grab his mother’s smartphone it’s set in Tim’s great
Grandmother’s front room we see her uh sitting in the background his mother is dressed to go out four friends on the writer waiting for her and a pair of martial art cage fighters rather than shepherds are kneeling before Tim with presence of U tribal identity a Sunderland AFC football shirt and a Miner’s
Lamp Tim incidentally if you look on the far right is um on the stairs as a four-year-old facing the evening alone with the television the mother’s words are written around difficult to read here but written around the red outline and they I won’t read them all but they include
The words we we were a normal family a divorce or two mental illness addiction domestic violence the usual thing my friends they keep me sane take me out listen and night out of the weekend in town is a precious ritual finally I wanted to end with a recent work of art concerned with
Children in one of the current major conflicts this is Banky mural we believe in boroa dinica dianka borrow dianka Ukraine it’s sprayed on the wall of a missil damaged kindergarten the image by the way has since been turned into a stamp in Ukraine in November 2022 Banksy posted this photo and six
Others set in Ukraine and it shows the Russian leader Vladimir Putin being thrown by a child a reference I think to the biblical story of David and Goliath representing Ukraine and Russia of course we still don’t know the identity of Banky he Bristol born artist he’s been active since the 1990s
And of course Ju Just to mention Putin’s um well-known sport or favorite sport is Judo but he was stripped of his Taekwondo black belt and his honorary Judo Title by the international Judo Federation in March 2022 I’ve shown you how children were guarded from ancient Egypt to the
Present day and just to end with something that John F Kennedy said children are the living message we send to a time we will not see thank you