of the mind or heart. My mother searched for hers every few years and finally, failing to find it, tried unsuccessfully to overdose on tricyclic antidepressants. There was institutionalization. She recovered, partially. Today she lives alone, unemployed, in a condominium her exhusband, my father, bought for her so that she would stop showing up, needy and homeless, on his sons’ doorsteps. On the rare visit I pay her, she will occasionally try to resurrect that old alliterative sobriquet, Donovan Duck, speaking in a baby voice, as if I were still two, as if time could be turned back. Every so often, my mother will dig out a snapshot of me as a child and mail it to me. Her reasons for choosing a particular photograph are always a bit mysterious. I study them for significance. Not long ago, she sent a photograph in which, naked, ten months old, sitting in the bath across from my brother, I appear to be attempting to gnaw through my rubber duck’s skull. The picture is dated January 1973.
27 Writes the art historian Anne Higonnet, “The modern child is always the sign of a bygone era, of a past which is necessarily the past of adults, yet which, being so distinct, so sheltered, so innocent, is also inevitably a lost past, and therefore understood through the kind of memory we call nostalgia.”Take a look, for instance, at one of the most famous representations of childhood, Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, for which the painter dressed up a neighbor’s son in a luxurious costume so dazzling it seems spun from sky. To a contemporary eye, the lad’s blue satin suit, beribboned shoes, and lace collar look old-fashioned, but no more so than the painting itself. It was painted in 1770, after all, when people favored such fancy getups, we assume. In fact, the outfit was already old-fashioned in Gainsborough’s time, as was the pristine natural landscape over which the boy so aristocratically presides. What to a contemporary eye appears to be the portrait of a noble scion, commissioned no doubt by his proud parents, is actually a bit of mise-en-scène, an eighteenth-century precursor to photographs of children dressed like shepherdesses or cowboys and posed before painted scrims at Coney Island or Sears.
A hundred years after Gainsborough painted The Blue Boy, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais gave the world another famous portrait of childhood, Bubbles. Here again is a child fancifully dressed in a lace collar and an antiquated suit, this time of green velvet rather than blue satin. Millais’s preschooler is younger than Gainsborough’s tween, and he is also cuter—porcelain-faced, pink-lipped, with a curly mop of strawberry blond hair. Whereas the Blue Boy gazes directly at the viewer, assuming the conventional, almost cocky pose of an adult, Millais’s moppet has been transfixed by the bubble he has just blown from a pipe. He is, it seems, assuming no pose at all. The original title of the painting was A Child’s World—that realm so unlike our own into which the painting offers a voyeuristic glimpse. Rather than presiding over a landscape, the boy sits on a block of weathered stone in a garden of potted plants, the sort of place one might encounter in the pages of Beatrix Potter. The scenery has grown more domestic, more suburban, but it still evokes a bygone, preindustrial past. Thanks to Pears Soap, which purchased the copyright to Bubbles and turned it into a print advertisement, Millais’s mass-produced image eventually eclipsed Gainsborough’s museum piece in the iconography of childhood, adorning collectible plates and ephemeral toiletries as well as the pages of magazines. Soap bubbles have been a symbol of innocence ever since.
In her amply illustrated study Pictures of Innocence, Anne Higonnet identifies several subgenres of child portraiture. Along with children in costumes (the genre to which Bubbles and The Blue Boy belong), there is, for instance, the genre of children with pets. Antique costumes, Higonnet argues, make the child seem timeless; pets make them seem like animals—less conscious than us, less human, more natural: “Usually the pets are small and cuddly—kittens, puppies and bunnies were favorite choices—cueing the viewer’s interpretation of the child.”
28 The reefers must be plugged into special electrified bays or their contents will spoil. Hazardous chemicals must be stored in special compartments belowdecks to minimize the danger of a conflagration or spill. The lightest containers must go on top, or the forces impinging on the bottom containers when the ship begins to pitch and roll may be greater