Portraits of children from the Baroque to the Romantic era
Since this year, the Anhalt Art Gallery in Georgium Palace, in the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz, has been accessible again. After several years of renovating its main building, one of the most important collections of Old Masters in Central Germany is literally being shown in a new light. The highlight of the year will be the special exhibition “KINDSKÖPFE – Kinderporträts vom Barock bis zur Romantik” in the fall. Masterpieces from Anthonis van Dyck to Philipp Otto Runge, more than half of which are on loan from important Central European collections, take us back to a time when the ideas of the Enlightenment not only significantly changed the image of childhood, but also the genre of children’s portraits.
The exhibition is sponsored by the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Portraits of children are a natural part of our modern visual culture. Anyone who has children today tries to record their development in detail in pictures – usually photos. However, this was not always the case. Within the traditional genre of portraits, depictions of children initially developed relatively hesitantly. They mainly served families of the highest rank, who presented the continuity of their own dynasty in their offspring. In the 17th and 18th centuries, childhood underwent a fundamental re-evaluation as an independent phase of life, distinct from adulthood. This was also associated with significant innovations in the conception of the child portrait.
The selection of outstanding portraits of children from the Baroque to the Romantic period, from Anthonis van Dyck to Philipp Otto Runge, compiled in this exhibition and its catalog, takes us back to a time when the ideas of the Enlightenment not only significantly changed the image of childhood, but also the genre of the child portrait. The exhibition, which spans from the 17th to the first half of the 19th century, focuses on the Age of Enlightenment. With its new pedagogical ideas, it brought with it a fundamental re-evaluation of childhood. The new image of childhood as an independent phase of human development, in which the carefree and “natural” education of a young person was to take place, found expression in new types of images. From then on, the social role of the sitter was less in the foreground than the developing personality, which appealed emotionally to the viewer with demonstrative naturalness.
The exhibition on the transformation of children’s portraits between the Baroque and Biedermeier periods is embedded in an anniversary year in Dessau-Roßlau in 2024, sponsored by the state of Saxony-Anhalt, to celebrate the founding of the Philantropinum by Johann Bernhard Basedow 250 years ago. As an important building block of the Dessau-Wörlitz reform movement, this model school of the Enlightenment was closely linked to modern ideas on child education and the re-evaluation of childhood as a valuable phase of life in its own right.