As I discussed in my posts on the painters William Bouguereau, Emile Munier, Sophie Anderson and Leon Perrault, various scholars in recent decades have demonstrated how our current ideas of childhood have evolved over the last two hundred years. From the late eighteenth century onwards, what is widely called the ‘Romantic’ view of the early years emerged. In this visualisation, former notions of original sin were discarded and a perception of infancy as an epitome of purity and innocence emerged. Previously, children had been regarded as ‘small adults,’ both equally fallen and in need of salvation because of the temptation of Eve.
In the newer formulation, childhood was a separate moral state from adulthood, before the curse of adult knowledge arrives, and it came to be regarded as a new social ‘class,’ one that was marked by special clothes and activities (especially formal education). By the late nineteenth century this was the prevailing view, as reflected and confirmed by paintings such as John Everett Millais’ Cherry Ripe. This picture is based upon a famous portrait of Penelope Boothby by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1788) but its look by 1879 was very consciously old fashioned. Like a girl in an illustration for a children’s book by Kate Greenaway, Millais’ daughter is posed in outsized mob cap and pink sash, her whole appearance announcing that she has been consciously dressed up to look pretty and winsome. Nonetheless, even in this image some art historians have detected traces of an adult subtext, as hinted at in the connotations that plucking cherries can have in English. The girl engages the viewer directly and boldly, a half smile playing upon her lips, in a manner that will be familiar to readers who have also read my postings on Bouguereau, Munier and Perrault. Strikingly, as early as 1898, Marion Speilmann, in her biography of Millais, remarked upon the espièglerie, the ‘roguish,’ ‘frolicsome’ or ‘mischievous’ quality in some of Millais’ paintings. The girl in Cherry Ripe might well epitomise that quality and some critics have certainly had no doubt that this was the case- and that Millais did the same in other paintings too.
The separate social category of ‘child’ was further reinforced by such developments as compulsory state education, a booming Victorian industry for books and toys, and a deliberate separation of girls’ from women’s fashions in the same period- for example, the very rigid distinction made between ‘girls’ who wore their hair long, loose and decorated with ribbons and bows and ‘young women’ whose transition to puberty and social adulthood was marked by the rite of ‘putting the hair up.’ This period was probably the peak of the Romantic notion of the child. Within just a few decades in the twentieth century, it came under pressure and we are, arguably, still addressing the iconographical confusion that was created.
Fritz Willis (1907-1979) was a painter and illustrator based in California who was active professionally from the late 1940s into the 1960s. His specialism was ‘cheesecake’ or ‘pin-up girls’- erotically charged images of young women in their lingerie, swimwear and, sometimes, topless. Willis’ women were used widely in advertisements and magazines. Intriguingly, though, Willis was employed to apply his readily recognisable pin-up style to a series of adverts for Chiffon tissues. These featured a young girl, nicknamed ‘Angel-Face,’ who is dressed only in her socks and underpants, and who is caught out (by us, the adult viewer/ parent) playing at dressing up in her mother’s high heels, hats and gloves and painting her toenails bright red. This ‘baby cheesecake’ exploited the tensions that exist between her imitation of womanhood and the actual age of the child. Unquestionably, Willis’ primary aim was to provoke amusement over the cuteness of little girl’s behaviour: she gets ready for a night out, trying on jewellery, applying make-up and perfume and admiring herself in the mirror; she reads Vogue and a restaurant menu for the prestigious and exclusive Lochinvar Room at the Hotel Mark Hopkins in San Francisco. The presence of a kitten and the fact that her feet are tiny in her mother’s sling-backs reminds us that this is all just endearing play. We laugh at her mimicking adults, but there is a mild discomfort too: when she tries lipstick or puts on her mother’s elbow length gloves, she is playing with markers of adult sexuality that she is not meant to understand.
Another US illustrator and cartoonist with a style and output very similar to that of Willis was Peter Hawley (1916-96). He drew young women in lingerie and swimwear but also designed a series of Bell Telephone System adverts in the late 1950s in which goofy, winsome tots adorned with pearls are seen engaged in some adult occupation- setting out for the office or teaching a teddy to read- when they’re interrupted by a phone call. Again the contrast between adult activity and childish play is ruthlessly exploited to evoke our amusement and attention.
These two commercial artists are named and known, but many graphic designers of the period produced similar advertising materials. Carnation Milk was a further brand that made very explicit use of the girl-as-mature woman trope: in one 1940s advertising campaign, ‘It Gives a Girl Glamour,’ a little girl wearing only her pants and her mother’s slip-ons, is seen with her back to us, her face reflected in a handheld mirror as she applies lipstick. Little girls aren’t just made of sugar and spice, we’re told; if they’re “rosy and giggly and delectable with curves,” then they’re probably also benefitting from milk. In ‘The Pride of the Block’ a baby in a pram is declared “A heartbreaker, if ever there was one. At her age too!” ‘A Star is Born!’ features a girl posing like a film star in her mother’s hat, fur, gloves, frock and shoes: “Give her time! She’ll be as beautiful as her current movie heroine…. Girls are such copycats,” we’re told. The American underwear brand, Carter’s Spanky Pants, also made good use of the joke of the daughter dressed as her mother in adverts published during the 1950s and ‘60s. Many other clothing firms’ adverts played with the contradiction between the fact that their target customers were children, but that those little girls wanted to imagine they were grown-ups (for example RAR, Eatons, Wundies, Starletta, Burdine and Scampers Lingerie Boutique “for America’s best undressed girls”). In 1961, a full page advert for Her Majesty slips showed a girl fretting over the “tribulations of being a beauty.” She is seen examining herself in the mirror: “I wish I had less freckles and more Her Majesty slips.” The stereotypes of feminine beauty were deeply entrenched: the Chubbettes ‘slenderising’ range of clothes for girls was marketed as “apparel that makes girls look slimmer,” promising that “she can have a tummy and still look yummy.”
In November 1966 Fairy Princess advertised their new range of cosmetics designed specifically for little girls while, in 1974, Love Cosmetics used a heavily made-up little girl in an off the shoulder frock, smouldering- whilst hugging her teddy- to sell their Baby Soft Perfume (“Because innocence is sexier than you think”). Especially notable amongst all these advertising campaigns was a long running one from Coppertone suntan lotion, which featured a small girl on a beach having her swimming trunks pulled off by a little dog- thereby revealing the contrast between tanned skin and pale bottom. The academic Anne Higonnet, whose Pictures of Innocence I have cited before, noted that many men convicted of child abuse offences had told researchers that this advert was “one of the most erotic stimuli they had encountered” (Thames and Hudson, 1998, 192).
In all these advertising campaigns, the juvenile presence substitutes for the adult female, but her conduct remains the same. Higonnet went on to observe that adverts like the Coppertone campaign “feed off what remains of Romantic childhood,” marshalling its traditional indicators one last time, yet she argued that the late twentieth century was a “transitional time… in which the old signs of childhood are no longer viable but new ones have yet to become credible.” Twenty five years on, it seems we are still struggling to define what Higonnet called “a new concept of childhood” but, as she recognised, the eighteenth century had created a new paradigm to match changed social circumstances- a fact that demonstrates that these reinventions are perfectly possible, but may only be recognised with hindsight. Another art historian, John Wood, has highlighted the fact that, whilst the Romantic view of childhood led to an assertion of children’s rights and the need to protect them, that increased protectiveness has increasingly put society “in conflict with biology” (J. Wood & J. Crump, Introduction to Jan Saudek, Realities, 2002, fn.24). This conflict is leading to the implosion of the Romantic child paradigm, but what replaces it is still unclear. She proposed the idea of the ‘knowing child’ instead, one that is far more familiar with the ways of the world and of adults; they “have bodies and passions of their own. They are also often aware of adult bodies and passions, whether as mimics or only witnesses” (Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence, 207). By mimicry, Higonnet surely meant such behaviour such as that depicted by Fritz Willis and others. I am sure as well that when she chose the adjective ‘knowing’ she was well aware of the direct gaze at the viewer that painters like Bouguereau and Munier had given to their subjects one hundred years previously. A quarter of a century on from Higonnet’s book, we might very well add that this ‘knowing child’ is one that is much more exposed to the pressures of advertising and (now) social media than she could then have imagined.
Writing in 1998, at the tail-end of the grunge and riot-grrl movements in rock music, Higonnet looked at song lyrics and art work- such as Nirvana’s still-controversial Nevermind album cover -and reflected on how the work of these bands showed that “innocence… turns out to be highly susceptible to commercialisation. The ideal of the child as an object of adoration has turned all too easily into the concept of the child as object and then into the marketing of the child as commodity.” Higonnet pointed to the parallel infantilisation and sexualisation of women that bands like Hole, Bikini Kill and Babes in Toyland sought to expose and challenge. The issues their songs highlighted persist and, arguably, have worsened in the decades since (Higonnet, 192-194).
For more information on Victorian era art, see details of my book Cherry Ripe on my publications page.
johnkruseblog 
[…] bra (“just like my mum’s”); I have discussed this style of marketing in another post. Brenot’s poster designs, for consumer goods, holiday destinations and films and theatres, […]
LikeLike