by The thing about drawing children is that they are always moving. Even when they’re told to stand still in one spot, they’re forever quivering – and if you expect anything different, it can leave you very frustrated.
My father’s patience was sorely tested when he was a young art teacher doing portraits of his young daughters. Even now, I remember painting it for me. I was maybe four, and I tried my best to stay very, very calm, unnatural like that – you can see it in my posture and my fixed expression. I was determined not to make the slightest twitches, because when my older sister sat for her portrait, she could not keep her life in, and my father was so frustrated that he left his face indistinct. smudge and abandoned the whole thing.
I have a framed portrait of my childhood on my wall. It’s a beautiful picture and I definitely have something about it, but mostly it shows a child trying to get it right.
A new exhibition at Chatsworth, Picturing Childhood, draws on five centuries of children’s paintings, by artists such as Raphael, Anthony van Dyck and Lucian Freud. I like to think that my father may have shared his frustrations with these painters, some of them from so long ago – just as their subjects may have shared mine.
These works of art would almost certainly be commissions, documenting a family or bringing in an heir, so it should come as no surprise that they feel staged. Many of the pictures show children standing next to their parents, or sitting gracefully – as in the exquisite portrait of William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham, and his family, painted in 1572. But this picture conveys real affection also expressed: the children hold animals and fruits, the smallest one sits on her aunt’s lap.
Sometimes, the children are restless as if playing or running, but even then, they often look a little stiff or self-conscious – like five-year-old Henry Boyle, all dressed up in a tunic golden as “The Boy of Egremont” (a medieval story favored by painters in later centuries). I recognize Henry’s expression, looking out at me from this 17th century portrait. I have seen many a child’s face, and it says to me, “When am I going to stop doing this?”
As an illustrator of children’s books, I often draw young people, although my characters are created from imagination: from memories, photographs and sketches. My concocted children, Charlie and Lola, and Clarice Bean, need not sit still. And so when I draw, I start from within: I wonder what motivates this particular child. How do they think? What are they feeling? How do I explain their personality in pictures? I’m there to tell you what can’t be said in words, to go beyond the surface and draw out the emotions of each character.
My Charlie and Lola books are essentially conversations between a seven-year-old brother and his three-year-old sister – the affection they have for each other is evident in the illustrations. The books explore how children use their imaginations to solve problems. Clarice Bean is a very different child: talkative, energetic and full of observations. We are seeing the world through her eyes – what we see in my drawings is her understanding of things.
I have always loved watching children. Their interactions are as different as those of adults, whose speech is not yet protected by experience. Whether nervously tugging at the hem of a sleeve or scuffing a shoe along the ground in rage, their movements often tell us what they’re thinking.
Illustration is a more abstract art than portraiture. In a commissioned portrait, the story is controlled, so at first glance, the child you see is the child you want to see from the parents: nice, affectionate, even-tempered and well-mannered. They are putting on a show and it feels like it. However, when I look at Joshua Reynolds’ 1784 portrait of Georgiana Spencer, Duchess of Devonshire, and her baby daughter, it is the child who looks most alive. Perhaps the artist had to accept that no child so tiny was being married, and perhaps he was caught up in the vitality of this little girl. She is staring intently at her mother’s face, delighted at the game of pat-a-cake they are playing – although poor Georgiana has the empty word for someone who longs to lay her hand. down.
This painting, from 240 years ago, gives us a glimpse of the energy shown by children – something that illustrator Quentin Blake has always managed to translate into ink, pencil and paint, bringing life to each which makes children spin about it. You feel his enjoyment there. Children are also openly curious, which can be quite disarming. Raphael captured this perfectly in his drawing Woman Reading with a Child (1512), shown at Chatsworth. A mother (perhaps) pulls a small child to her side as she reads, and the child looks directly out of the picture towards us, holding our gaze as if we are the artist and is introspective about what she is doing. we are doing. There is something completely childlike about her appearance.
The Flemish painter Cornelis de Vos was highly regarded in the 17th century for his skill with the likenesses of children. Among his most famous works is a portrait of his own daughter Magdalena. Painted in 1623, it is one of Chatsworth’s treasures, and the inspiration for this exhibition. This little girl looks at us confidently – I can imagine she is about to laugh. She certainly looks happy, and why wouldn’t she be, exquisitely dressed in an embroidered orange-red dress with an elaborate lace collar. She could be any child today, wearing a treasured Disney princess outfit.
It’s the sentences like Magdalena that attract me the most. They connect us over time to our own childhood. That’s why I like listening to children talk and play – they remind us that we were all like that once. I especially love the look to the east that a child wears. You can see it in the faces of my own characters. I think I probably learned it from Charles Schulz and his drawings of Charlie Brown. (Schulz is a master of these little sentences that mean so much.)
Not all of my characters are portrayed like Charlie and Lola, with their big eyes and simplified features. Sometimes, I have taken a more classical approach, as in the decorated edition of Mary Poppins that I did a few years ago, where the bodies are rounded and the faces are more detailed and realistic. But it is not the proportions of the characters that determine whether they are believable.
I would argue that John Burningham’s illustrations of children, in stories such as Avocado Baby (1982), with their sketchy lines and scratchy colored pencil, explain the movements and moods of a child as beautifully as EH Shepard’s graceful figures for Winnie-the-Pooh. (1926).
That truth comes from observation, like understanding the easy way a child will sit, firmly planted with legs outstretched, a posture we must relearn and practice when we grow up. Toddlers are more likely to kneel with their legs tucked under them, and seem to be able to do so as long as they like. When a child is found still it means they are sleeping; a child’s sleep seems to be very different from an adult’s – more abandoned, somehow, more confident. You can see it in the beautiful painting Baby on a Green Sofa (1961) by Lucian Freud. It has such a personality, this picture, the personality of both the artist and the infant. You feel the firmness of the child, imagine how it would be to pick him up, the weight of his head against your hand – I think he won’t wake up. This portrait is about paint and abstraction, shape and color. It is under the hand of the artist, but it also tells a truth about a sleeping child.
Most of the artworks in Picturing Childhood are portraits from the past. Some are very impressive works of art, some are amazing, some are beautiful and some are interesting; most talk about wealth and status. The children who sat for these large pictures are often expertly drawn, but they are not completely visible. They are certain idealized visions of youth. And there are very few portraits of children from poor families, because there was no one to pay for them. Those children are invisible. So, look at these works with curiosity and, if you really look, they may reveal more than they were meant to.
Picturing Childhood is at Chatsworth, Derbyshire (chatsworth.org), today-October 6; Clarice Bean: Smile by Lauren Child (HarperCollins, £14.99) is published on 28 March
