Chasing Butterflies: Capturing the Transience of Childhood

Emily Knight talks at the Ashmolean Museum about eighteenth-century
portraits of children. Throughout history we have attempted to
capture the transience of childhood in images, whether through
portraits painted in the eighteenth century or photos taken on a
phone and shared on social media today. In this short talk Emily
Knight takes us back to the eighteenth century, when artists
including Thomas Gainsborough, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds,
Henry Fuseli and George Romney were painting children’s portraits.
Ideas of childhood had begun to shift in the era, which was
reflected in the portraiture. At the time infant mortality rates
were high, meaning parents felt an even greater desire to have an
image of their child to capture those fleeting early moments. Emily
shows how these ideas were reflected in the portraiture through
recurring motifs like the butterfly. Emily Knight is a DPhil
candidate in History of Art at the University of Oxford researching
posthumous portraiture in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth
centuries in Britain, considering the ways in which these works
became a language for mourning and commemoration.