A Naughty Child

Object Type

Oil paintings with scenes of children became popular with collectors such as John Sheepshanks and the Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend, as well as appealing to the sentimental tastes of a very wide section of the Victorian public.

Subjects Depicted

The success of this painting was remarkable and led to a number of commissions for child portraits. It was thought that the subject of this painting was a boy who was brought to the studio but refused to remain where he was put. His mother, exasperated, sent him to stand `in the corner' and Landseer decided to paint him as he stood. An alternative possibility is that it is a portrait of Landseer's own daughter, the second child of a liaison with Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford. It is hard to tell because of the custom of dressing young children of both sexes alike, until the boys were old enough to wear breeches.

People