「マスター・ヘア」ことフランシス・ジョージ・ヘアの幼少期

Reynolds painted this small child in 1788, and the boy is Francis George Hare, about two years old, reaching up to point at something we cannot see. It was commissioned by his aunt, who was raising him, and Reynolds gives it the soft glow and easy charm he had learned from studying the old masters. What is telling is the mood. By the late 18th century, partly under the influence of writers like Rousseau, people had begun to think of childhood as its own tender, innocent state worth celebrating rather than a small imperfect adulthood. When the picture was engraved a couple of years later it was sold simply as Infancy, and it became one of the most reproduced images of a child in Britain. A Rothschild baron bought the original in the 1870s, and it passed to the Louvre after his death.