Trust Lucian Freud to look at his own young child with the same stern eye with which he looked at his paintings of adults. The baby’s head is enormous – a bulbous blast of brown, cream and gray – in his 1961 portrait of Bella Freud. In fact, it’s big enough that it can loom at you through a long gallery in Chatsworth House and draw you in magnetically. to see how the ridged, wrinkled and crumpled facial features are rendered life-size as Bella sleeps on a couch. fists clenched formidably. Her left eyelid is very slightly open, revealing a yellow eyeball.
It may be unsentimental, but Bella is a ball of mighty life. You sense that the artist is amazed by the autonomy, energy and willpower that this small creature exhibits. In his eyes she is a giant. Infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence – they slip away so quickly as we try to capture the ever-changing wonder of a growing person. Visualizing Childhood, the title of Chatsworth’s sensational show spread across the immense baroque halls and rooms, is something we mainly do with our phones these days. How fortunate that you are a Freud, who can portray your child with such monumental depth.
More than 300 years before him, the Flemish artist Cornelis de Vos did something similar. He also painted his young daughter, but where Freud’s baby lies untamed and unsocialized on a couch, Magdalena de Vos stands upright in a beautiful red dress with a wide lace collar and looks at her father with a dimple of intelligence as she poses patiently.
It’s a contrast that seems to create simple, worn-out clichés about the way children have been depicted in art and how childhood has been socially defined over the centuries. In the past, we are told, children were not allowed to be children. They were seen and treated as little adults, fiercely disciplined to fulfill their future roles in the social order. Childhood shows that it is not that simple. Yes, The Fox is dressed in a child’s version of an adult 17th-century costume, but a grin seems to appear and the artist is clearly delighted by her chubby cheeks and hands: she is joyfully not an adult. Her precocious good manners emphasize the playfulness of her innocence. She is, in a word, adorable, and the artist wants us to know that.
From the earliest works in this exhibition, it is clear that there has never been a time when adults did not see children as children. Where would Renaissance paintings of the Virgin and Child be without knowledge of how babies behave and interact with their mothers? A special drawing by Raphael proves that Renaissance artists gained this insight through keen observation. In 1512 or 1313 he subtly sketched a young woman holding a book in one hand while cuddling a small child with the other. She is absorbed in her reading while the child stares at us. It is possible that the woman reads to the child. Or maybe she’s reading herself, a lower-class woman caring for someone else’s child and needing distraction. Either way, this masterpiece of metalpoint drawing is a movingly intimate look at real life from more than half a millennium ago.
Tudor childhood doesn’t seem so bad either. Lady Arabella Stuart, painted in 1577, may have been dressed in adult clothing for her portrait, but she also got to hold her favorite doll. And it looks exactly like the queen of that time, Elizabeth I herself. Is this the Tudor equivalent of giving a girl a powerful Barbie?
Even in the tortured seventeenth century, when religious unrest and revolution rocked Britain, children were recognized as children. In a painting of an unknown family by William Dobson, made just before or during the Civil War, the man and woman appear to be Puritans, dressed in black, but their four children are more cheerfully dressed and are allowed a rabbit, fruit and flowers.
So it may seem as if childhood is eternal and unchanging – but that is not entirely the case. A real change takes place in the 18th century, when young portrait subjects become much more spontaneous. In a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, raises her arm to playfully mirror her daughter, who holds both arms wildly aloft. Their eyes meet in loving communication as Reynolds captures what anyone would recognize as a natural moment between mother and baby. Nearby, the daughters and sons of the Earl of Bute are shown by Johan Zoffany in the 1760s playing in the garden, climbing a tree, jumping on a bench and carrying a bow and arrow.
There’s even a rare remnant of this 18th-century cult of childhood: a pram designed by the architect William Kent, shaped like a giant shell with sculpted snakes wriggling around it. It was designed to be pulled by a goat when a young Devonshire child, like a god, inspected the estate.
As an exploration of childhood, this exhibition could be accused of a very privileged social history. Not only the ancestral pram, but most of the art, including the Raphael and the Freud, is owned by the Duke of Devonshire whose chair this is. But Chatsworth also offers plenty of fun for many with its extensive gardens, complete with a 300-year-old water cascade that children are sure to still splash around in. This exhibition is partly an attempt to bring family fun indoors, giving younger visitors interactive entertainment amid the home’s formal interiors: it includes soft furnishings for you to lie on to look at the painted ceilings, food smells to guess at the dining room and an optical device by artist Abigail Reynolds that allows you to scan the Painted Hall through the eyes of a hawk.
They will have to watch the children like hawks if they expect their play to be as neat as a Tudor child’s collar. But this is an exhibition full of life and insight that makes art and history accessible to everyone. It’s funny and moving and makes you wish you too had a house full of painted children.
• Picturing Childhood, at Chatsworth House, runs from March 16 to October 6