| My dissertation analyzes visual representations of childhood in the final century of the ancien régime. Central to these images is their correspondence to new ideas about childhood promulgated by the Enlightenment. These images of children speak not only to new educational theories, but also to France's effort to uphold and, in some cases, undermine the weakening social, political, and religious structures of the ancien régime. Enlightened thinkers and educationalists stressed two factors that shaped a child's development: education and recreation. Within this scope of understanding, my dissertation is divided into four discrete chapters.; Chapter 1 reviews the historiography of the critical literature on images of children in eighteenth-century France. In this chapter I evaluate the trends and oversights in the art historical literature from the early nineteenth century to the present. Eighteenth-century criticism has been purposefully omitted, as it is assessed in the subsequent chapters.; Chapter 2 treats images related to the education of boys and is divided into essentially two parts. The first section reviews the educational literature and facilities for boys during the final century of the ancien régime . In this section, a boy's relationship to his family, the church, and the state are evaluated. The second section is an appraisal of the images related to educational theory and practice.; Chapter 3 is an exploration of the images of girls and their education. Like the previous chapter, Chapter 3 is divided into two main parts. The first explores the educational literature and facilities for girls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this section, emphasis is placed on a girl's limited curriculum which included needlework, reading and writing. This section is followed by an analysis of corresponding images.; The final chapter treats images of children at play. The educational literature related to concepts of play is reviewed in the first section and is followed by an appraisal of the relevant eighteenth-century French images. Child's play became increasingly associated with education during the eighteenth century. Moreover, child's play was emblematic of innocence, an innocence that was often associated with the pastoral landscape. |
