In the Month of June, L.A. Ring, 1899

Lecture at Drottningholm Palace by Pehr Hillestrom, 1779.

Bath time, 1897 Virgilio Tojetti

‘The Quiet Pet’ (detail) by John William Godward, c. 1906.

Laughing Girl, 1882 by Raffaello Sorbi

Woodblock prints (1700s) by Suzuki Harunobu

Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko, Life Is Everywhere, 1888

Fathers as nurturers during the Napoleonic era

Portrait of Monsieur Gaudry giving his daughter a geography lesson, 1812, Louis-Léopold Boilly

The Gaudry portrait is even more a portrayal of “the good father” than a lesson in political geography. The painting provides evidence of a reorientation of the father’s role within the family that had taken place from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In her study of archetypal family structures during the Revolutionary period, Lynn Hunt traces “the rise and fall of the good father” and his eventual replacement, as an ambivalent figure, by republican fathers “who were now officially depicted as friendly, supportive, and interested in their children.” While the gradual transformation of the king into a good father began before the Revolution (as manifested in the portrait of Louis XVI, and not a tutor, instructing his son in geography), it was not until the Napoleonic period that a positive image of paternalism was explicitly rehabilitated, as Boilly’s commission for a portrait of the yet-childless Napoleon as père de famille so clearly indicates. In the meanwhile, children assumed new importance as the affective center of gravity in representations of families, a shift that is indicated by the painting’s focus on the demure Mlle Gaudry. Rather than reading the Gaudry portrait in twentieth-century terms, as an expression of “unusual sensitivity and psychological insight,” Boilly’s portrayal of an affectionate and respectful relationship between father and daughter is better understood as conforming to a new social construction of the family that came to the fore during the Napoleonic period, in which fathers assumed new roles as nurturers or guides.

Source: The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France, Susan Siegfried, pp, 115

Émile Munier (French, 1840–1895), "Playtime", 1886

"The Close of Day" by Frederick Cayley Robinson, c. 1898

Nighthawks, Edward Hopper, 1942

The Unequal Marriage by Vasili Pukirev, 1862.

Femme au tigre François Martin-Kavel

‘View of the Salon Carré at the Louvre’ by Alexandre Brun, c. 1880.

A Devonshire lane by Henry John Yeend King

Victor-Gabriel Gilbert (French, 1847-1935) Le déjeuner du chat, 1879