PICTURES OF INNOCENCE: The Child in Painting and Literature with Valerie Krips

British portraitists played an important and early role in creating the idea of childhood innocence, as Joshua Reynolds’ famous The Age of Innocence (1788) attests.

The image that Reynolds and other painters and sculptors of the period created was also to be found in a new literary form. Children’s literature, or books written specially for children began in 1743, with the publication of A Little Pretty Pocket-Book by John Newbery.

This talk discusses the interaction of these ‘images’ of childhood, the role they played in their contemporary moment, and continue to play today.

Dr Valerie Krips is Associate Professor Emerita of the English Department of the University of Pittsburgh, and Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Presence of the Past: Memory, History and Childhood in Postwar Britain, she is completing a book on cultural memory.