An Analysis of the Sexual Girl in Art

Here it is. I took me a while to write, but I think it turned out decently for a somewhat rushed job. Most of these images can be found at the Art Renewal Center, the Athenaeum and Wikimedia Commons. Almost all of the others can be found by searching Google for the specific artists and works. There are a couple of pieces mentioned here for which I do not have titles, and those may be harder to find. All I can say is that I searched for them beforehand and found them easily enough. The information here is all factual to the best of my knowledge. If you catch any errors, please point them out for the benefit of myself and other readers. Opinions and criticisms are mostly my own, but I tried to keep them fairly conservative and not read too much into works without any basis for doing so. I don’t think I went out on a limb on any of them, but I’ll let you be the judge. The article is broken into four parts, an introduction and three subheadings, for easier reading. If you know of any other works that you think should’ve made the cut, go ahead and point them out. Bear in mind that this wasn’t intended to be exhaustive, but I think I covered most of the major works, as well as many of the lesser ones. Enjoy!

AN ANALYSIS OF THE SEXUAL GIRL IN PAINTING, ILLUSTRATION AND SCULPTURE FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE PRESENT

Introduction:

Young girls, with a few notable exceptions, have been rejected as subjects unto themselves for the greater part of the history of art. Indeed, the entire history of girlhood reads like a long meandering trickle that explodes into a veritable raging river around the Victorian era, when girls were accorded an especial providence in the new enlightenment concerning the nature of childhood innocence, both spiritual and corporeal. However, this development was complex and not altogether ingenuous. In any case, girls, who up until very recently in human history — being placed at the bottom rung of the familial and cultural hierarchy and viewed as essentially useless until reaching marriageable and child-bearing age — had been largely ignored until then. Boys, as heirs to the family name and the culturally favored reins of manhood, were the preferred gender in the longstanding patriarchal traditions in which long-standing works of art have been produced.

What, then, can be said of the Victorians’ legacy with regard to the young girl? Much of it is left to be discerned through the magnanimous gift of hundreds of thousands of paintings, illustrations, sculptures and photographs offered up to posterity. My own thought, or a facet of it, is that we may find in this surplus of girlish expression not just an embrace of girlhood to some degree but a desire to become it. Youthful femininity was a mark of perfection for the Victorians, and perfection was something to be attained unto. That this consequently might have widely eroticized the phenomenon of girlhood is no mystery, and there are precedents for it.

The Greeks and Romans idealized the male form in their art, which became a springboard for or otherwise reinforced homosexual practices in those cultures. Boys, predominantly in the form of cupids and putti, finally got their billing in medieval and Renaissance art. And the sleek and handsome David, as the slayer of Goliath (the ultimate embodiment of the grotesque and over-masculinized adult) likewise trumpeted the virtues of boyhood. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the era of apprenticeships, often begun at very young ages, when boys were assigned to workers and craftsmen to learn the trades that would provide them with a living when they reached adulthood. To see that pederasty may have been widespread under those conditions takes no great feat of the imagination. As for the Victorian period, William Stead and others uncovered levels of child prostitution happening at the time in Western civilization to rival anything being reported in Third World Asia today.

In many respects the Victorian attitude toward children was as fundamentally off as the medieval view, which likened children to miniature adults. At the least the Victorian notion of absolute innocence resulted in a two-pronged dilemma, the one side of it fetishizing children’s supposed innocence and the other introducing an unobtainable ideal for children themselves. Modernity, in part thanks to Freud, ushered in a more balanced (although still problematic) approach, but the Victorian notions of childhood have lately made an upsurge. Children, with their qualities of openness, vulnerability and lack of ideology, have always been ripe for exploitation by the extant culture and its dominant social and political biases, these being rooted in the need of adults to define childhood according to their own beliefs and prejudices. While many of those beliefs are genuinely founded on protecting children, as many or more are not, such that it becomes an increasingly Herculean task to sort those which serve children’s interests from those that serve adults’, especially those adults who have any degree of power over children.

To be sure, much of what modernity taught us about children is even now being rolled back by assorted religious, political and social interests, in part due to upheavals in the culture war and in part because of a moral panic over child sexual abuse and the availability of child pornography on the Internet. Girls have notably been underestimated and misunderstood in the wake of the New Innocence movement, as books like Sharon Lamb’s The Secret Lives of Girls make abundantly clear. We’ve just begun to understand the true depth and range of childhood’s sphere, yet that understanding is being tossed piece by piece into a maelstrom of conflicting concerns and the heady waters of emotion.

A clue to the undercurrents of the sexuality of children in art may be found in the dramatic shift in the structure of the family and society in the late Renaissance. The intimate familiarity that adults had previously had with children began to change during this period as children were becoming separated from adult life and relegated to a class status all their own. Thus, for those adults who had no children, or even for parents who spent little time with their own offspring, childhood may have attained a kind of alienness, an exotic quality that later became fetishized, resulting in the explosion of interest in children, especially girls, in the Victorian era. A vacuum had been created by this social structure, a dearth of adult-child intimacy, which had to be filled by art and literature. But this superficial form of contact was ripe for fetishization, and that in turn may have opened up the Pandora’s Box of the sexual objectification of children, resulting in phenomena like child prostitution.

The irony is that children are sexual beings, as we know today, yet it was quite probably the Victorians’ mistaken belief in children’s sexual purity that fueled their free-floating erotic fascination with them in the first place. According to W. T. Stead’s famous exposé for the Pall Mall Gazette, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” the interest in deflowering virgins had become a draw for Victorian sexual thrill-seekers, such that the business of prostitution became increasingly aimed at supplying younger and younger girls for the trade. Likewise, soft-core child pornography could be quite easily obtained in the late nineteenth century, generally in the form of illustrated or photographic postcards demonstrating amusingly bawdy tableaux or bathroom humor or as straight nude images, sometimes disguised as medical or ethnographic illustrations.

But the Victorians did not ordinarily tackle the concept of the erotic girl child so overtly, at least not through respectable artistic and cultural channels. Instead they often filtered it through their immense palette of esoteric sexual metaphors, as well as through the rose-colored lens of the sexually pure child. In this manner they were granted a lot of leeway, particularly in terms of nudity, without generating the sort of controversy that many modern artists have faced. Likewise, because Victorian artists may have lacked an understanding of child sexuality, they tended to explore the child as an all-purpose symbol for the highest of human ideals — hope, innocence, charity, et al. Consequently, many of the most beautiful and singular examples of the child subject in Victorian art became inadvertently erotic.

Part 1: Signs and Symbols of Pubescent Sexuality

Many of the prominent themes of Victorian art had their precedents in the Renaissance, as did much of its symbolic language. Prior to the late Renaissance, children, if they appeared in art at all, were generally portrayed as diminutive versions of adults, which is in keeping with the psychological and social views of youth at the time. One of the earliest notable images of the girl child is Titian’s portrait of Clarissa Strozzi, a curly-headed toddler standing in a white gown with her pet dog, painted around 1542. White, as the color of purity, remained a common color for young children’s clothing from the 1600s through the 1800s and frequently signaled virginity. Hans Baldung had even explored the feminine form from infancy to old age in his unique work ‘The Seven Ages of Woman’ and Petrus Christus had painted ‘Portrait of a Young Girl’ in 1460, but generally speaking, images focusing exclusively on the common girl child as subject were only just beginning to be produced by Titian’s era.

Adolescent girls were a bit more common, though the Renaissance adolescent was considered by most standards of the time a full-fledged adult, which made them ripe for consideration as an erotic subject. Explorations of the budding sexuality of girls had some common metaphors. One of these was the descent into the bath. Joseph-Désiré Court’s ‘Young Girl at the Scamander River’ and Rembrandt’s ‘Suzanna in the Bath’ set the standard. The pale and reluctant Suzanna in Rembrandt’s painting is very nearly naked while the darker, older, fully-clothed man standing behind her prepares to remove what remains of her clothing as Suzanna steps modestly into the water, shielding her breasts from the view of outside observers. Court’s image presents an even younger bather, a girl of perhaps thirteen, her breasts newly budded, dipping her toe into the river as a young man helps her out of her wrapping. In both of these paintings the girls are preparing to release the thin white sheet that covers the last and most well-guarded part of their youthful femininity in order to test the waters of adulthood. These images convey the transformation of girl to woman. The concept was carried over, first in Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s sculpture ‘Bather,’ and on through the Victorians, with notable cases being Paul Peel’s ‘The Little Shepherdess,’ Jules Lefebvre’s ‘Chloe,’ and Adolphe-William Bouguereau’s ‘La Gue.’ Hugo Boettinger’s ‘Mädchen beim Baden im Walde’ would also come later.

But some Victorian artists even took this concept a step further, placing much younger girls in the same context, or very near it. Georges Jacquot’s gorgeous sculpture ‘Jeune nymphe descendant dans l'eau’ and Paul Chabas’ painting ‘La Baigneuse,’ for example. In both cases the girls, while clearly hovering near the edge, have yet to enter puberty. Within this artistic dialogue one could also place images like Thomas Couture’s ‘Little Bather,’ where the girl is still so young that she hasn’t even set foot in the water yet, and in fact no water is even visible around her. Couture’s little bather sits nude on a white cloth. That Couture placed a crucifix and, more importantly, an uneaten apple, a symbol for a yet-unspoiled Paradise, in this image next to the girl was no accident. Couture’s message is clear: we are beholding a sexual innocent.

The Renaissance also birthed the tradition of tableaux in which children mimicked roles traditionally filled by adults. One of the most famous examples of this was Sir Joshua Reynolds’ ‘The Infant Academy,’ with children playing all the parts in a scene of an artist painting a portrait. The children are all so young that their genders are ambiguous, especially since their genitalia remains hidden from the viewer’s eyes. One gets the impression that, like the parts of girls and women in Renaissance theatre which were often played by young boys, the young painter’s infant subject, who wears a feminine headdress, may actually be male. Reynolds is in some sense playing with that very quality of sexual ambiguity in very young children. Meanwhile, although their genitalia is likewise unseen, the genders of the children in Carle Van Loo’s ‘Painting,’ which presents precisely the same idea, are not nearly as ambiguous. The artists are boys and their semi-nude subject, with her pearl necklace and twisted braids of hair, is clearly a girl. The toddler girl’s plump form and ruddy cheeks, lacking the slightest hint of adult contours, appears to mock adult sexuality; even so, it is difficult not to make mental connections between the toddler girl and the eroticized adult she is pretending to be.

During that era very young children were most frequently painted as putti, of course, the winged amors that swarm Biblical and mythological scenes like some strangely humanoid species of bird. As representatives of Cupid or as Cupid himself, they were symbolically connected to erotic love. Overwhelmingly they were painted with male genitalia or with their nether regions hidden from view or otherwise obscured. In some cases, even without clear sexual distinctions, putti were paired up, giving the human mind prejudiced toward the yin and yang of heterosexual couples the impression that one of the putti was female, such as in Caesar van Everdingen’s ‘Jupiter and Callisto’ and Hans Zatzka’s ‘Venus and Her Attendants’ and ‘The Goddess of Spring.’ There were cases, however, in which female putti did appear. A close examination of Peter Paul Rubens’ ‘Venusfest’ or Paul Jean Gervais’ ‘Bacchanale’ reveals that some of the putti are clearly feminine, and Baron von Lind’s ‘Dancing Putti’ offers a hetero couple hand-in-hand, their respective boy and girl parts displayed for the viewer to remove any doubt.

Yet it was the Victorians again that finally allowed female putti to flourish — as angels, fairies or prepubescent manifestations of the goddess Psyche, Cupid’s female counterpart. A putto appearing in a window of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, in Milan, Italy, is either female or genderless, depending on one’s interpretation. The butterfly-nabbing angel of Bouguereau’s ‘Le Captif’ and the wet, shivering cherub of his ‘L'Amour mouille’ are also a good deal more feminine than masculine. The flower-bearing putti of Philipp Otto Runge’s ‘Le Grand Matin’ are overtly female. But predominantly female putti were to be found in the realm of illustration rather than the fine arts, especially in bookplates, posters and children’s storybook images. A standout example can be seen in Koloman Moser’s ‘Secession V’ art nouveau poster, one of Moser’s most recognizable images, wherein a naked girl angel or fairy sits atop a flower with her legs crossed, her hair flowing down around her feet. The late Victorian age and early twentieth century were rife with these feminized cupids. There is Gertrude Thomson’s trio of fairies beneath the cap of a mushroom, an illustration greatly admired by Lewis Carroll, and several of JC Leyendecker’s iconic Saturday Evening Post putti are feminine—those on the March 26, 1910, December 30, 1911, and January 1, 1916 covers, for example.

Psyche did appear in several fine artworks in her childlike form. Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s sculpture of a seated Psyche, part of a Cupid and Psyche pair, has the girl teasing her companion by hiding his bow from him. She is a demure and dainty nude, with subtly swelling breasts and crossed legs. In Jose Maria Vel Salgao’s ‘Cupid and Psyche’ she is also a teen who looks particularly young standing next to a full-grown and muscular Cupid. Alix Beaujour later painted the couple as black children floating across the sky, and Francis Picabia placed either Psyche or a female putto in front of the central figure in ‘La femme de l'amour.’ One of the most erotic versions of the petite Psyche is William Sargeant Kendall’s intimate portrait, with her delicate little set of butterfly wings and her translucent gold dress, one sleeve of which slips sultrily down her shoulder. Facing the viewer with her doe eyes and moist crimson lips, she could almost be a child model in a modern fashion magazine. The most famous, however, is in Bouguereau’s ‘Amour et Psyche’ sometimes called ‘The First Kiss,’ which remains one of his most oft-reproduced images.

Another sexual metaphor rooted in the Renaissance was the girl with a broken vessel, which signified to viewers the loss of her virginity. Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s ‘The Broken Pitcher’ is the preeminent example. The young girl stands with her dress opened near the top, revealing one budding breast, while she holds an apron full of picked flowers. She has apparently taken Robert Herrick’s advice to virgins and gathered her rosebuds. But it is the broken pitcher itself which is the most telling sign of her sexual experience. Adolphe-William Bouguereau could not have missed the implications in painting the same theme, but unlike in the Greuze image, Bouguereau’s girl appears quite unhappy. The Victorian sentiment regarding the loss of innocence is evident here, and the phallic fountain spigot behind the girl stands as a clear cue, a reminder of her loss. Emile Munier may have been referencing this tradition with ‘The Broken Vase,’ wherein a very little girl sits on a corner chair, presumably being punished for damaging the titular vase, the shards of which lie scattered at her feet. Perhaps it is an unconscious reference, but what makes the image less than innocent is the slipping down of the child’s white garment and the exposure of one tiny nipple. The arm raised to her forehead likewise channels Renaissance paintings of the Sabine women or Persephone being carried off as sexual trophies.

Getting back to Greuze for a moment, he frequently focused on sexual themes pertaining to young girls, especially the discovery of her sexuality and the consequent loss of virginity. Several scholars have suggested that the death of the bird in ‘A Girl with a Dead Canary’ is a stand-in for sexual defloration, and this time the girl is clearly saddened. ‘Votive Offering to Cupid’ presents a girl barely into her teens, one nipple protruding from her dress, praying at an altar to the god of love, and ‘Innocence’ gives us a virginal girl in white holding a lamb.

The symbology of the cherry as it pertains to girls is worth exploring too. Thomas Campion scribed the following lines in his poem, Cherry-Ripe:

There is a garden in her face
Where roses and white lilies blow;
A heav’nly paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do grow;
There cherries grow that none may buy,
Till Cherry-ripe themselves do cry.

“Cherry-ripe!” was a frequent cry of fruit sellers from Renaissance England on through the Victorian years. Campion’s imagery evokes a young girl who, although beautiful, is not yet ready to be “picked.” John Everett Millais references the poem for his seminal work ‘Cherry Ripe,’ in which a very young girl with lily white skin and rosy cheeks sits demurely on a log with a bunch of cherries nearby. Scholars have noted how the position and shape of her hands implies a vulva. In Victorian art cherries frequently take on elements of familial intimacy, such as in Lord Frederick Leighton’s ‘Mother and Child’ and Francois Alfred Delobbe’s ‘The Offering,’ or of the forbidden, such as in Frederick Morgan’s ‘Cherry Pickers’ and Fritz Zuber-Buhler’s ‘The Cherry Thieves.’

An implied sexual relationship might be taken away from Gustav Klimt’s ‘Sappho,’ in which the lesbian poet fiddles with a harp while a small girl rests her head on the woman’s shoulder. Compare this with images like John Duncan’s illustration ‘The Evergreen,’ Alexander Ivanov’s ‘Apollo, Hyacinthus and Cyparissus Singing’ or Jules Delaunay’s ‘La Leçon de flute,’ with their allusions to Greek pederasty. As in Duncan’s illustration, the satyr is a potent symbol of sexuality in many artworks, giving a collaborative work by François Boucher, Etienne-Maurice Falconet and Jean Ouvrier a strong connotation of infantine sexuality. In the drawing Pan sits with two adult bacchantes while a boy satyr and toddler girl play at their feet. What is particularly curious about the child couple is their position: the little girl lies on her back, her legs spread and feet in the air, while the satyr boy’s face hovers between her legs. As this image has all of the visual cues of a bacchanal scene — wine, grapes, and Pan himself — the suggestion of oral sex could not have been missed by the original viewers. Likewise, the child couple of Hans Makart’s ‘Faun and Nymph’ have erotic resonance. The little girl rests her hand in the faun’s lap, her chest is exposed, and the shadowy faun looks over at the nymph with a wanton expression. The pedophilic connotations of the naked boys and girls circling around Pan in Arnold Böcklin’s ‘Pan im Kindereigen’ is of interest here as well. There may also be sexual possibilities in the selling of slaves in works like Gustave Boulanger’s ‘The Slave Market’ and Jean-Léon Gérôme’s ‘Slave Auction,’ both of which include nude or partially clothed children as part of the lineup of slaves to be sold.

Part 2: The Nude and the Semi-Nude Girl

Little girls with tantalizingly displayed shoulders, thighs and chests are a mainstay of Edwardian and Victorian art. Louis Lagrenée’s portrait of a young Josephine puts the girl at a piano with her dress falling down over her right shoulder. In Sir Joshua Reynolds’ ‘Ladies Amabel and Mary Jemima Yorke,’ the cleavage of the older girl’s dress stops just above her nipples. Bouguereau’s ‘Les jeunes baigneuses’ depicts one of the little girls pulling her dress up, on the verge of revealing what lies beneath it, and he puts his ‘Petite fille au bouquet’ in an even more revealing condition. Agathe Röstel’s ‘Am Weihnachtsmorgen’ shows two young children lying in bed, the little girl uncovered and in an arguably erotic state of dishabille, while the girl in Marie Breslau’s ‘Paresse matinale’ lies half in and half out of bed, her partially developed chest fully exposed.

The subject of Emile Vernon’s ‘Girl Holding a Nest’ is a beribboned young girl in an wispy, all-but-invisible sheath, and Carlo Marocchetti’s sculpture ‘Bambina che dorme’ gives us a sweetly vulnerable sleeping girl whose nightgown has been partially shed in the throes of sleep. In Seymour Joseph Guy’s ‘Making a Train’ a little girl, mayhap playing at royalty, allows her dress to drag along the floor behind her, baring her chest in the process. These works may be designed to hint at the adult sexuality to come, but they often, in fact, project an eroticism all their own.

At times there are fetishistic elements to these images. Stephen Douglas Volk’s ‘Young Girl in Yellow Dress Holding Her Doll’ is alluring in her filmy dress and matching stockings. The doll becomes part of the costume, an accoutrement of girlhood. This idea is echoed by Fritz Zuber-Buhler’s ‘Young Girl Holding a Doll.’ Nudity is added to this concept in Paul Peel’s ‘Waiting for the Bath’ and later in Erich Heckel’s ‘Girl with Doll (Fränzi).’ Another sort of fetishism might be detected in Charles Spencelayh’s ‘Darning Socks,’ wherein the little girl is fully clothed head-to-toe but for one bare ankle and foot. And still another in Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s ‘Le Maître d'école’ sculpture, with its male teacher bending a young female student over his lap in preparation for a whipping. He grasps the hem of her dress with one hand, ready to pull it up and expose her soft parts to the sting of the switch he holds in the other. In this modern era of sensitivity over spanking and sexual abuse by teachers, Falconet’s work can be viewed as mildly shocking and/or inadvertently titillating, depending on one’s perspective.

In contrast to these teasing images, full nudity of children in Victorian art tends to be more pastoral than erotic. This is a carryover from the painted idylls popularized by neoclassicism, in which family groups, often nude, rest and play in idealized natural backdrops or classical venues. A common theme in this bent was naked children frolicking on a beach. Sorolla and Benito Rebolledo Correa perfected this theme, and singular examples like José Júlio de Souza-Pinto’s ‘La Baignade,’ are noteworthy. Andre Charles Voillemot’s ‘Allegory of Spring’ is a typical sort of Victorian artwork in a pastoral context, with a near-naked young woman gathering flowers while a cupid hovers near her head and a nude toddler girl releases doves at her feet. A subversion of the idyll theme can be found in Frank Dicksee’s ‘Startled,’ in which a woman and child, both unclothed, flee up the banks of a river, having been caught skinny dipping by a boat coming downriver.

In Frederick Arthur Bridgman’s ‘The Bathing Beauties,’ several women and girls prepare to take a dip in the ocean, and Henryk Siemiradzki’s ‘By a Pool’ shows a young mother bathing her children in an ancient Greek setting. John Duncan, a wonderfully inventive Scottish artist, gives us a classical wedding in ‘The Coming of the Bride.’ Everyone in the painting is dressed finely except the very youngest children and a redheaded preadolescent girl, who are perfectly bare. Several of the works of Pierre Joseph Coomans fit into this category—‘A Classical Concert,’ ‘Feeding the Turtle,’ ‘An Afternoon’s Amusement’ and ‘A Warm Exchange’ notably, as does Henry Brown Fuller’s ‘Illusions,’ which captures a lovely interaction between mother and daughter in rich and sumptuous tones. Roy Cleveland Nuse’s ‘Dorothy and Friends’ shows two unclothed children standing on a bank feeding ducks, Dorothy presumably being one of the children, though that is unclear. The children have very short hair, though that style was not uncommon for girls in the 1920s when the painting was made. Yuri Kaploukh’s little ‘Sheperdess’ peeks up from a field of wildflowers.

Other artists have played off of or subverted the concept, such as Symbolist painter Léon Fréderic in his ‘l’Age d’Or’ series of paintings, which presents men, women and children (in various states of undress) in a classical mode but with elements of modernity stuck in for good measure. His evocative ‘The Lake, The Sleeping Waters’ runs in the same vein, with its dozens of sleeping nude children forming a human tapestry across the surface of a lake. Maxfield Parrish used the neoclassical mode to express fantasial themes. Few people know that the young model leaning naked over a prone teenaged girl in Parrish’s famous imaginary scene ‘Daybreak’ was his 10-year-old daughter, the older girl a friend of hers. His daughter also posed that same year for the Mazda Edison calendar image ‘Egypt,’ a little nude girl resting by a small pool as an Egyptian woman in the foreground plays her harp.

Some images show girls pulling their dresses up to their waist to reveal their nakedness beneath. Alexis-Joseph Mazerolle portrays ‘QuiQui Charlotte’ in profile, the toddler lifting her white dress full of flowers in offering to a bluebird resting on a branch in front of her. The image contains Symbolist details such as the stylization of the trees that frame the little girl, but it is her unconscious nakedness that gives the image its appeal. In Joaquin Sorolla’s ‘Las dos hermanas,’ the youngest of the sisters lifts her blue dress to avoid getting it wet, and Frans Smeers’ ‘Fillette au bateau’ depicts a kindergarten-aged girl standing in water with her dress hiked up around her chest. Unlike with Mazerolle’s and Sorolla’s images, the little girl’s genitals are clearly visible. Amusingly, she appears to be lifting her dress to welcome a toy boat between her legs.

Full nakedness in the right context could be sexual. ‘Afternoon Dreaming’ by Hughes Merle introduces a little girl lying on the ground in a garden, nude but for a white cloth draped over her thigh. The girl’s narrowed eyes, sensual expression and the intriguing softness of her body invite the viewer to join her in her reverie. Likewise for Ramon Casas Carbo’s nude dark-haired beauty lounging seductively on a floor strewn with rose petals.

Paul Peel, a Canadian painter who frequently portrayed children undraped, usually either before or after a bath, made the eroticism of the young girl a central theme in ‘A Venetian Bather,’ in which we see an undraped exotic lass from behind standing before a mirror. Her pose directly calls on classic poses of women wherein they rest their weight on one foot, their bodies curved to produce maximum appeal. The Venetian bather’s womanly attributes, though undeveloped, are thus made prominent by this stance. The young girl considering her own image is also the theme of Jules Auguste Leroux’s ‘The Mirror.’ A lovely adolescent, covered only marginally by the bunched up garment she holds in her hands, examines her reflection in a large mirror. She arches her back and neck subtly, testing her feminine wiles on herself. In Ruth Gikow’s 1960 watercolor ‘The Kitchen,’ a bare young girl looks into a mirror while her mother sits at a kitchen table, preparing a meal. These images have their precedent in Jean-Baptiste Poultier’s sculpture ‘Fillette se regardant dans un miroir,’ lending credence to Lord Lyttleton’s suggestion:

What is your sex’s earliest, latest care,
Your heart’s supreme ambition? To be fair.

The focus of Annie Louisa Swynnerton’s ‘New Risen Hope’ is a confident and curious little girl emerging from what appears to be water, while an untitled 1889 piece by Akseli Gallen-Kallela puts a nude child, facing away from the viewer, in the fore of the painting, relegating her parents to the background. This might be compared with Joaquin Sorolla’s ‘La nina curiosa,’ another nude child with her back to the viewer. Vincent van Gogh’s drawing of a little girl sitting naked on a small chair has all the compelling power and weight of a van Gogh without the abstraction characteristic of his paintings, and William Stephen Coleman’s ‘Nymph with Conch Shell’ and ‘Flower Girl’ are Victorian paintings to the core. A particularly captivating drawing is that of M. Charlemont, which featured in the Revue des Arts Décoratifs. The drawing was rendered as a design for part the ceiling of the Opera of Vienna and shows a little nude girl lying on her side with her head propped up in her hands, a quintessentially childish pose.

Among the most beautiful examples of the openly considered nude child are sculptures. The three children (two boys and a girl) playing in Constant Ambroise Roux’s ‘l’Eau’ are wonderfully natural, as are those in William Robert Colton’s ‘The Springtide of Life’ and the little kneeling child in Giovanni Benzoni’s ‘A Young Girl and Her Dog.’ Perhaps creating works in the shadow of death also frees pretensions, as the little girl that tops the Tomb of Markos Botsaris, created by David d'Angers, feels contemporary and timeless, much like Thomas Woolner’s ‘In Memoriam (Four Children in Paradise).’ Meanwhile, Lorenzo Bartolini’s ‘Principessa Napoleone Elisa Baciocchi’ and Jean-Baptiste Roman’s ‘L'Innocence’ are notable for their classical feel. Though perhaps the most outstanding sculptural tribute to a child ever conceived is Jean-Charles Chabrié’s ‘Rêverie d'enfant.’ The anatomical details are perfect, and few could deny the powerful draw the subject has on the viewer. From the supple curves of her bent leg to the inviting sweetness of her repose, Chabrié’s child embodies both essential childness and an adult precociousness, such that her seat appears to be a throne and the girl herself the Queen of all Childhood, inviting her worshippers to kiss the foot that dangles endearingly in front of her. There is also an undeniably sexual power about her, especially when considered in a modern context.

Part 3: Oblique Views of Girl’s Sexuality and Blatant Eroticism

Hints of juvenile sexuality are evident in the positions in which some artists captured their models. One of the most famous is Mary Cassatt’s ‘Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.’ The child, though fully clothed, lies back in the chair with her legs apart and an arm behind her head. The child in Lucian Freud’s ‘Large Interior, Paddington’ is naked but for sleeveless white t-shirt, lying on the floor with a hand placed suggestively on her rump. In Léon Perrault’s ‘Nude Child with Dove,’ the little girl reflexively pulls away from the viewer with her legs tightly together, clutching a white dove to her breast. The nude adolescent girls in Ida Teichmann’s illustrations play with one another in teasingly erotic ways while the young girl in Edvard Munch’s ‘Puberty’ looks vulnerable, nearly overpowered by the dark shadow of her own emerging sexuality. Cross-reference this against Ernst Neuschul’s ‘Jung-Mädchen Akt,’ in which the scene is virtually identical but no shadow is visible. The girl in Berthe Morisot’s ‘A Young Girl with a Cat’ flirts with the viewer, leaning back against a wall with her head coquettishly cocked to one side while she strokes a parrot. The sisters in Anders Zorn’s ‘Fröknarna Salomon’ dress up as geishas and the lass sitting on the bow of the boat in Edwin Thomas’s ‘Safely Home’ seems to pose for the young boys hauling in the boat. Paul Sieffert positions the little girl in ‘L'Heure du bain’ standing naked in front of the bathtub, one of her feet coyly stepping on the other and a knee gently raised, subtly concealing her private parts.

Particularly into the twentieth century and in contemporary art, many nude or sexually charged images of children have been filtered through the lenses of fantasy, horror or surrealism, in essence creating psychic barriers between the artist/viewer and the sexual child. Those barriers become a safe zone from which to examine these themes, like watching a man-eating tiger from afar. This is because, by placing the nude or sexual child in the realm of the increasingly taboo, society has made her powerful and dangerous. This power began to take root in the Victorian era, but those Victorians who relegated children to a box of asexuality vastly underestimated their ability to break free of this prison, or they were simply in denial. Fantasy was the preferred filter for the Victorians, who disliked ugliness. John Collier’s ‘The Land Baby’ and Gaston Bussiere’s ‘Deux enfants aux couronnes de fleurs’ are good examples in the area of painting, as are many of the works of Bouguereau and those artists who followed in his footsteps or were contemporaries, such as Emile Munier, Charles Thirion and Charles Durand. Symbolist Alexander Mann has a young nymph floating magically above water in ‘The Long Cry of the Reeds at Even.’

While many artists of the twentieth century increasingly tackled these issues from such a vantage point, a handful actually began to confront children’s sexuality head-on. Among the most accomplished of these were Balthus, Jules Pascin and Egon Schiele, and occasionally Alice Neel. Her portrait of her daughter, ‘Isabetta,’ remains one of the most powerfully straightforward images of the erotic girl child ever painted. The girl confronts the viewer directly, and the unmitigated boldness of her stance makes her no shrieking violet or potential victim. With her challenging stare and her fists at her hips, she calls to mind Sally Mann’s photograph of ‘Virginia at 4.’ Piet Mondrian’s ‘Nude Girl’ sketch, done before his abstract period, and Eric Fischl’s ‘Girl with Doll’ are also straightforward explorations of a girl’s sexuality. Meanwhile, Jeff Koons’ nudist ‘Child Couple’ may be a throwback to the pastoral trend, but the twin girls in Ludwig Kasper’s ‘Zwei Mädchenakte’ are not. Eero Jarnefelt’s painting of a young boy and girl wrestling in the buff is playfully suggestive, but the uncompromisingly erotic images of Graham Ovenden have even run him afoul of the law.

Two illustrators who utilized young girls in blatant confrontations with sex were Franz von Bayros and Heinrich Zille. Austrian artist Franz von Bayros generated a whole career around illustrating pornographic tableaux, many of which included little girls or even cherubs as direct participants. Bayros’ work was deemed illegal by Austrian authorities, forcing him to flee the country. He resumed his work elsewhere, producing hundreds of extravagantly and proficiently illustrated scenes as bookplates or as illustrations for pornographic novels. Meanwhile, Heinrich Zille, a German cartoonist of the Weimar era, masked his erotic works as social commentary, but it’s difficult not to see the erotic underpinnings of works like ‘Drei Berliner Gören,’ in which three little girls sit on a curb with their legs apart, revealing to the viewer that they’re wearing no panties under their dresses, or beach scenes like ‘Berliner Strandleben,’ with naked or half-naked children running around everywhere.

Surrealist artists that have addressed the sexuality of girls include the great Salvador Dali, whose ‘Dali at the age of 6, when he believed that he was a little girl’ presents a naked child holding an arguably sexual metaphor, a large shell, as she peels back a thin sheet of water hovering over a slumbering dog. Since Dali frequently dealt with the Freudian realms of the subconscious and dreaming, we might read into the painting the idea that what is happening in the subject’s head, in this case the artist himself represented in the form of a female child, is much more than the surface expresses. The child is breaking the steadfast rule of letting sleeping dogs lie, inviting all sorts of mischief to spring out of the subconscious where they might otherwise be safely harnessed and controlled. Another well-known surrealist who confronted this issue even more in depth was Dorothea Tanning. Images like that of a little girl undressing in a hallway with an overgrown sunflower (‘Eine kliene nachtmusik’) are typical of her oeuvre.

The modern inheritors of that tradition are numerous—Christin Couture, Joseph Sherly Sheppard, Mark Ryden, Mike Cockrill, Shiori Matsumoto, Rita Ackermann, Trevor Brown, Fred Einaudi, Audrey Kawasaki, Michael Parkes and Jim Warren number among them. Each has addressed the topic of girl’s sexuality through some dark, magical or distorted lens, often all of the above. This trend has been maintained and likely will continue for a while to come, as society has yet to fully and honestly confront the matter of the young child’s sexuality.

But what trends shall we see in this area beyond the fretful gaze of modern man? It is difficult to project, particularly based on this overview, where I have merely scratched the surface. There are several pertinent areas that need to be explored, many of which tie into literary phenomena. The relationship between Red Riding Hood, the Wolf and the Woodsman, for example, and how that relationship is explored in imagery. I have also neglected to delve into photography, a medium that introduces a whole new set of complications. As well there is the sexuality of boys, which should be addressed on its own terms. Hopefully I have provided a passing analysis of the rich and complex history of the artistic exploration of young girls’ sexuality, though I admit it is by no means comprehensive or in-depth. Many of these works deserve more detailed analyses than I have provided. Perhaps in the future I will take more prolonged looks at some of them, but for now this surface consideration must suffice.