The Child in Painting Series: Family Portraits, A Society on Display

Event Description

An online art history lecture by Gilles Genty

Family portraits, in both painting and photography, gradually established themselves as a distinct genre between the 18th and 20th centuries. Serving both to preserve family memory and to stage social identity, they became a means of affirming social status during the 19th century. Carefully composed and highly structured, these images follow established conventions that signal belonging, respectability, and continuity.

This lecture is part of the series The Child in Painting, from the 18th to the 20th Century — a series tracing how painters across three centuries captured the evolving condition of childhood: its struggles, its innocence, and its gradual recognition as worthy of rights and dignity.

Presented in French

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