The Age of Innocence

Reynolds's The Age of Innocence from around 1788, now in the Tate, is among the most reproduced images in the history of British art — a small informal portrait of an unknown young girl seated in a landscape that became, through Victorian reproductions, the defining image of childhood innocence in popular British culture. Reynolds painted several pictures of unknown children in the late 1780s as 'fancy pictures' — small informal works distinct from his commissioned portraits that allowed him to explore idealized subject matter without the constraints of likeness and social function. The painting's enormous subsequent popularity is a measure of how completely it captured a cultural ideal of childhood that the early Victorian period would institutionalize in literature, education, and social policy. Tate's holding of this work connects it to the British romantic tradition in art — Blake, Constable, Turner — though Reynolds himself belonged to an earlier generation whose classicizing ambitions sat more comfortably with Enlightenment aesthetics than with romantic feeling.

Reynolds renders the child's face with soft, blended brushwork that creates an effect of idealized innocence. The warm palette and the atmospheric landscape background create a sentimental mood that contrasts with the more formal technique of his adult portraits.