PORTFOLIO

How did children really become children? Why did European society eventually begin to recognise ‘small adults’ as individuals in their own right? Art history provides exciting answers to these questions with its motifs from different eras. Portraits of children from the 17th to the 20th century tell the emotional story of the emancipation of the child as a utility value to the child as a fully-fledged member of a family and as an independent being. The history of the child is first and foremost a history of adults. In the world of the aristocracy, the estate-based society and the clergy, children were treated like small adults. Children had a utility value. They were a source of labour and secured power and family dynasties. Children had no world of their own. They had no feelings of their own and were controlled by others. There was no children's world, let alone children's needs, which had to be respected. Education consisted of imparting duties and tasks. But when and, above all, why did society begin to change? What socio-political changes created space for children?  With these questions in mind, the exhibition traces how the portraits of children in art history provide answers. In the end, it is people's fight for their own freedom that also enabled children to enjoy these rights. The struggle for self-determination of adults in the revolutions against the encrusted estates and the Age of Enlightenment also made it possible for children to become increasingly individualised. The gradual rejection of adults' grip on their lives as an economic and political pawn began.

European art history shows in an impressive and emotional way how society changed its view of children following reinventing itself. The emancipation of the child is most significantly visible and tangible in the pictures from the 17th/18th century to the 20th century. From constructed family portraits to multi-faceted portraits of children that focus on their different lives and emotions. With the portraits of children, art history thus also answers a question that concerns us all: how do we became who we are? Childhood provides essential answers, in the past as well as in present times.