Das Zeitalter der Unschuld

Reynolds painted this small portrait of a young girl in the late 1780s, near the end of a career spent flattering the grandest sitters in Britain as the first president of the Royal Academy. He seems to have called it simply A Little Girl. The poetic title it carries now, The Age of Innocence, was attached only after his death, borrowed by a printmaker who engraved it in 1794. We are not even sure who she is. The best guesses are Reynolds's own great-niece, Theophila Gwatkin, whom he painted more than once, or a young daughter of the Duke of Marlborough. She sits with hands folded, dressed in white against an open landscape. The picture became one of the most reproduced images in Victorian England, and hangs today at Tate Britain.