Children in American Family Portraiture, 1670 to 1810

N i670 three children of the Mason family, David, Joanna, and Abigail, posed for an unknown limner in Massachusetts (Figure i). As artists had always done, the painter emphasized those things that his patrons considered important. He focused on the faces and intricate costumes of the children by reducing the setting to a suggestion of tiled floor and a black void, and by positioning his subjects across the very front of the canvas. Their rigid full-length and nearly full-frontal positions overlap one another so slightly that no detail of costume is lost. All three children display expensive white linen, lace, ribbons, and jewelry. Eightyear-old David wears the voluminous petticoat breeches, slashed sleeves, and shoulder-length hair that were then the height of adult fashion, and carries the kid gloves and silver-handled walking stick of a gentleman. His hand-on-hip pose was commonly employed for adult men to suggest authority and elegance. His younger sisters exhibit the costumes, hairstyles, and accessories popular with all women of their station. The portrait emphatically presents the sex and social status of its subjects. Their stiff postures, solemn expresssions, and adult accouterments made the young Masons seem the very image of the seventeenth-century child as miniature adult. They suggest a social system in which the sexes and classes were clearly differentiated but age groups were not. Though social and cultural historians have often used paintings such as this one for illustration and example, few have attempted to examine large numbers of these visual artifacts.1 This article is based on the study of 334

Genealogy · Sociology · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Photography and Visual Culture

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