Let the Environment Speak: Attributes in Children’s Portraiture of the Seventeenth – Late Eighteenth Century

Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis

Abstract

It is difficult to imagine early secular portraits without one of their key constituent elements – attributes. Objects, animals, wardrobe elements, and other details that were depicted in representational and intimate compositions had to express as accurately as possible the social status, hobbies, or even character traits of the portrayed person, thus testifying to how that person sought to present themselves, and at the same time to record how others wished to see them. The latter circumstance is particularly evident in children’s portraits. For many centuries, children’s portraits, commissioned by their parents, guardians or other relatives, and usually modelled after adult portraits, primarily performed the functions of consolidating the family status and embodying the expectations placed on the offspring. Today, attributes seen in portraits can help us to trace these expectations. The subject of the article is six characteristic portraits of children from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries by local and international artists held in the collections of Lithuanian museums. Examining their iconography and, above all, their attributive symbolism, the author of the article seeks to verbalise the gradually changing image of interpretation and representation of childhood captured in these paintings.

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Having taken a closer look at the specific images of children in the collections of Lithuanian museums, it can be concluded that although attributes in the portraits of young children usually perform the function of structural and social attribution, the objects accompanying the children also bear witness to much more complex relationships between the portrayed child and their environment represented in the work of art, which pose considerable interpretative challenges. Early images of children are revealed as a complex and unique field of intersection between actual childhood and the external ambitions shaping it, in which attributes also play an important role.