Focus on this artwork and discuss the Hogarth's paintings of children.
From around the 1730s, Hogarth developed a genre of playful conversation pieces far removed from the grand history paintings that he really wanted to produce but for which he had no commissions. He was working against a background of what has been called a "new world" of childhood where the attitude to children was becoming more liberal. Family groups in painting became less formal and began to show parents and children enjoying recreational activities together. Portraits of individual children became more common than they had been in the seventeenth century and the idea of the "innocence" of childhood began to take root based on the view that the child was an uncorrupted blank slate as advocated by John Locke in his book Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). If the child was now innocent, however, the picture remained the product of a commercial transaction between the client and the artist and continued to fulfil a social function of demonstrating the happy family life and social status enjoyed by the customer. It also stood in a tradition of portrait painting of adults and children that had well established conventions.In 1730, Hogarth had produced the "before and after" pair The House of Cards and The Tea Party where various minor mishaps occur relating to a house of cards and a doll's tea party. Numerous clues in both works suggest a more serious message about broken marriage hopes and loss but the full facts are not known.The Cholmondeley Family of 1732 also included similar ingredients of impending disaster as a playful child goes to push over a pile of books while the older generation sit by, frozen, to be reanimated when the books fall. But in this work it is the mother who is included despite having died prior. Well stocked bookcases line the background which the adults can use to civilise the wild children.
history painting John Locke conversation piece Some Thoughts Concerning Education portrait painting