American Images of Childhood in an Age of Educational and Social Reform, 1870-1915

During the period 1870-1915, painters and photographers created some of the most famous contributions to American imagery. More often than not, these images dealt with the extraordinarily complex social issue of children and childhood, and the way that the sentimental value of children evolved alongside a transitioning nation. Post-bellum genre painters portrayed boys as defiant mascots of the nation, in communion with nature, at odds with social institutions like the school. These painters foreran the realist “Ashcan School,” whose paintings of misfit children illustrated the vices of the growing, clashing American city. Yet these were not the only images of children produced in this period. Paintings of the “Genteel Tradition” portrayed pampered children, and their photographic analogue, the “Photo-Secessionists,” attempted to establish a highly artificial rhetoric of the “child-angel.” Often, these discreet artists ironically unmasked the psychological complexity of real, living child models. Finally, documentary reform photographers invented a new, stark aesthetic mode to advocate disenfranchised child laborers. American art about children was not only profuse, but also treated the subject in new and unusual ways that often directly paralleled contemporaneous literature and social commentary. Yet curiously, while psychologists, literary and cultural theorists, and historians have generated a vast body of scholarship on the role of the child in America, their observations never intersect systematically with research on children in American art. This dissertation will attempt to rectify this gap in art historical research. It focuses on the brief but fecund time frame when American artists overwhelmingly depicted children. It discusses children exclusively as a subject, as opposed to the extant survey-oriented studies that sandwich children within a list of disempowered social groups. Simultaneously, I attempt to draw comparisons and contrasts between contemporaneous visual media—paintings, photographs, and drawings. This dissertation, though primarily intended to analyze visual culture at a specific historical moment, is interdisciplinary. By bringing observations from sister disciplines into the field of art history, and studying images side-by-side that are rarely spoken about together, I am hopeful that a more comprehensive understanding of the child in American art and society will emerge.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Art History

Grantor dc:publisher

Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Stitt, Amber C.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Adams, Henry

• American History
• American Literature
• Art History
• Child Studies
• Social history
• History of American Art
• children in American art
• Progressive Era
• childhood in American art
• American painting
• American photography
• Winslow Homer
• Robert Henri
• John Singer Sargent
• Alfred Stieglitz
• Lewis Hine

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1364908854

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:case1364908854