The Infant Samuel

The boy is Samuel, from the Old Testament story in which a child sleeping in the temple hears a voice in the night. He takes it for the old priest Eli calling him, but it is God, and he answers, speak Lord, for thy servant heareth. Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy and the great advocate of a lofty grand style, also kept a shrewder line in these tender pictures of children. This one struck a chord. It was copied, engraved, and sold as a print so widely that the kneeling boy became a fixture of Victorian nurseries and Sunday schools long after Reynolds's death. He first showed a version around 1776. This one is in Montpellier, in the south of France.