The depiction of social space in Childish thoughts: a material cultural analysis of a painting
Date
1991
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In Childish Thoughts, painted by William Henry Lippincott (1849-1920) in 1895, two women and a child occupy a domestic interior. Nearly all the material culture portrayed--architecture, decorative arts and costume--derives from the late nineteenth-century colonial revival movement and it invests the painting with the values attributed to "colonial" society by people in the late nineteenth century. However, the depicted space does not represent a typical 1890s interior, even those influenced by the colonial revival. ☐ The combination of the material culture, with its historical and moral associations, and the three female figures of different generations suggests a model for socialization that corresponds with the nineteenth-century "separate spheres" ideal: women preserve moral values and acculturate successive generations within domestic space. Social historians have demonstrated how this ideal departed from reality, and Childish Thoughts acknowledges the departure both in its compositional structure and in its fanciful depiction of a domestic interior.