Little Princes
Portraits of Children from the 16th to 19th Centuries from the Fundación
Yannick y Ben Jakober
85 portraits of children
from the private cultural foundation in Majorca offer fascinating
insights into the art of 16th to 19th century portrait painting. They
also provide an impressive view of the world in which children of
noble social classes from Central Europe, France, Italy, and Spain
lived. The identity of many of these children is known. Some of them
had a very moving fate, even when still very young – as for
example the later emperor Charles Vth who grew up in Mechelen with
his aunt Margaret, regent of the Netherlands; or Charles II of Spain
who inherited an empire in which ‘the sun never set’ before
he was even four years.
The paintings lead the viewers into a strictly regulated
world which becomes all the more touching because it is alien to our
modern sensibility. Babies, wrapped like cocoons and lying in luxurious
cradles, and children dressed like adults fascinate and astonish us
at the same time. The amulets given to noble and upper class society
children document a predominant belief (and superstition) in their
power to protect wearers from harm.
Because children of both
sexes were dressed in skirts until their seventh year of age, girls
are only identified by earrings or elaborate hairdos. Colors also
give no indication of sex: as a result, the viewer instinctively thinks
that the portrait of Louis XVth in a pink dress shows a girl. The
children’s predominantly serious faces exude a mixture of tender
charm and dignity, mirroring the high expectations their heritage
demands.
These moving portraits of ‘little princes and
princesses’ were often executed, due to the high death rate
among children, as reminders to posterity or, as is the case with
the high nobility, to prepare marriages – often within the family
- at a very early age. One may therefore view the exhibition as a
family history – the history of the great European dynasties
in which alliances played a decisive role. An example of this are
the portraits of the later French king Louis XIIIth and the Infanta
Anna of Austria and their mutual son Louis XIVth.
The chronological order of these portraits
exhibit the changes in children’s portraits over time. Around
the end of the 18th century, children’s portraits gradually
lost their strict elegance and became more lively, mirroring the more
liberal treatment of children in the society.
The exhibition is accompanied
by a 232-page catalogue including a general
introduction, essays on the paintings on exhibit, an index of further
children’s portraits in the Fundación Yannick y Ben Jakober
collection, as well as a bibliography. The catalogue contains 85 large-scale
as well as approx. 250 comparative illustrations in color. The retail
price of the paper back museum edition is 22 EUR.
