The peculiarity of drawing children is that they are constantly in motion. They are constantly fidgeting even when told to stay in one spot, and if you cared about anything else it could frustrate you badly.
When my father was a young art teacher, his patience was tested as he painted portraits of his young daughters. Even now I remember him painting me. I was probably four years old, and I did my best to remain very, very unnaturally still – you could see it in my posture and fixed expression. I was determined not to twitch even the slightest, because my sister couldn’t hold her vitality when she sat for her portrait, and my father was so angry he left his face blurry. tainted and abandoned everything.
I framed the portrait of my childhood on my wall. It’s a lovely painting and it definitely has something of me in it, but mainly it shows a kid trying to do it right.
Painting Childhood, a new exhibition at Chatsworth, draws on five centuries of children’s paintings by artists such as Raphael, Anthony van Dyck and Lucian Freud. I like to think that these painters, some from long ago, might have shared my father’s disappointment; just as their topics share mine.
Nearly all of these artworks are commissioned, serving to document a family or introduce an heir, so it should come as no surprise that they feel staged. Many of the images show children standing or sitting decoratively next to their parents; As in the magnificent portrait of William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham and his family, painted in 1572. But this picture also reflects real love: the children hold the animals with tenderness, and the fruit is perched on the lap of the youngest, her aunt.
Sometimes the children pose as if they were playing or running, but even then they usually look a little nervous or timid – like five-year-old Henry Boyle, all dressed in a gold tunic like “The Boy of the Year.” Egremont” (a medieval story that proved a favorite of painters in later centuries). I recognize Henry’s expression staring back at me from this 17th-century portrait. I’ve seen this on many children’s faces and it tells me: “When can I stop doing this?”
As someone who draws books for children, I usually draw very young people, although my characters are created from my imagination, memories, photographs, and sketches. My made-up children, Charlie, Lola and Clarice Bean, never need to sit still. And so when I draw, I start from the inside out: I wonder what motivates this kid. How do they think? What do they feel? How will I convey his personality through pictures? I’m there to tell you what can’t be told with words, to go beyond the surface and reveal the emotion of each character.
My Charlie and Lola books consist primarily of conversations between a seven-year-old brother and his three-year-old sister; Their love for each other is clearly visible in the pictures. The books explore how children use their imagination to solve problems. Clarice Bean is a very different child: talkative, energetic and full of observations. We look at the world through his eyes; What we see in my drawings is his impression of events.
I always loved observing children. Their interactions are very different from those of adults; Their expressions have not yet been preserved by experience. Whether they’re nervously tugging at the hem of an arm or angrily scuffing a shoe on the floor, their actions often tell us what they’re thinking.
Illustration is a more abstract art than portraiture. In a commissioned portrait, the expression is controlled, so the child you see at first glance is the child the parents want you to see: beautiful, affectionate, calm and well-mannered. They’re putting on a show and it feels posed. But when I look at Joshua Reynolds’s 1784 portrait of Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire, and her young daughter, I see that it is the baby who looks more animated. Perhaps the artist had to accept that such a small child could not pose, and perhaps he was amazed by the liveliness of this little girl. He looks intensely at his mother’s face, enjoying the cake blasting game they are playing; and poor Georgiana has the blank expression of someone who is impatiently waiting to lower her arm.
This painting from 240 years ago gives us an idea of the energy radiated by children; It’s something that illustrator Quentin Blake has always been able to translate into ink, pencil and paint, bringing life to everything kids do. You feel his satisfaction with this situation. Children are obviously curious too, and this can be quite disarming. Raphael observed this perfectly in his drawing Woman Reading a Book (1512), exhibited at Chatsworth. A mother (perhaps) pulls a young child close to her as she reads, and the child looks out of the picture directly at us, holding our gaze as if we were artists and what we were doing intrigued her. There is something completely childish about his appearance.
Flemish painter Cornelis de Vos was widely admired in the 17th century for his ability to capture the likenesses of children. Among his most famous works is the portrait of his own daughter, Magdalena. Painted in 1623, this painting is one of Chatsworth’s treasures and the inspiration for this exhibition. This little girl looks at us with confidence; I can imagine you laughing. She looks absolutely delighted, and why wouldn’t she, as she’s elegantly dressed in an embroidered orange-red dress with a lace neckline. Today it could be any child wearing a treasured Disney princess costume.
It’s statements like Magdalena’s that I find most touching. They connect us over time to our own childhood. That’s why I love listening to children chat and play; They remind us that we were all like this once. I especially love that sneaky sideways glance a kid gives. You can see this in the faces of my own characters. I suspect I probably learned this from Charles Schulz and his Charlie Brown drawings. (Schulz is the master of those little phrases that mean a lot.)
Not all of my characters are portrayed like Charlie and Lola, with their big eyes and simplified facial features. Sometimes, like the illustrated edition of Mary Poppins I did a few years ago, I took a more classical approach, where bodies were rounded and faces were more detailed and realistic. However, it is not the proportions of the characters that determine whether they are believable or not.
I would argue that John Burningham’s children’s illustrations, with their sketchy lines and scratchy colored pencils in stories such as Avocado Baby (1982), describe a child’s movements and moods as beautifully as the elegant figures E. H. Shepard drew for Winnie-the-Pooh. (1926).
This kind of truth comes from observation; like understanding how a baby can sit with its legs firmly planted out to the sides, a pose we must relearn and practice when we become adults. Toddlers are more likely to kneel with their feet under them, and they seem to be able to do this for as long as they want. Finding a child usually means that he is asleep; A child’s sleep seems to be very different from that of an adult; more abandoned, somehow more confident. You see this in Lucian Freud’s beautiful painting Baby on a Green Sofa (1961). This painting has such personality, both the artist and the baby. You feel the solidity of the child, you imagine what it would be like to lift him, the weight of his head resting on your arm; I’m sure you won’t wake up. This portrait is about paint and abstraction, shape and color. It tells a truth about the artist’s hand, but also about a sleeping baby.
Much of the artwork in Picturing Childhood is portraits from ancient times. Some are great works of art, some are magnificent, some are beautiful, and others are interesting; Most of them talk about wealth and status. The children seated in these magnificent paintings are often expertly drawn but not fully visible. These are, in a way, idealized childhood dreams. And there are very few portraits of children from poor families because there was no one to pay for them. Those children are invisible. Therefore, look at these studies with curiosity; If you really look, maybe they can reveal more than they mean.
Painting Childhood in Chatsworth, Derbyshire (chatsworth.org), today-6 October; Clarice Bean: Lauren Child’s Smile (HarperCollins, £14.99) is published on 28 March