The Age of Innocence (painting)

The Age of Innocence
The Age of Innocence
	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	76.5 cm × 63.8 cm (30.1 in × 25.1 in)
Location	Tate Britain, London

The Age of Innocence is an

oil-on-canvas painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, created in either 1785 or 1788 and measuring 765 x 638 mm. The sitter is unknown, but possibly, was Reynolds's great-niece, Theophila Gwatkin (who was three in 1785 and six in 1788), or Lady Anne Spencer (1773–1865), the youngest daughter of the 4th Duke of Marlborough, who would have been twelve in 1785 and fifteen in 1788. The painting was presented to the National Gallery in 1847 by Robert Vernon and has hung in the Tate Britain

since 1951.

Genre

The painting is a character study, or, in eighteenth-century terms, a fancy picture. It was painted over another Reynolds work, A Strawberry Girl, perhaps because the earlier painting had suffered some paint losses. Only the hands remain in their original state. Since 1859, deterioration of the overpainting also has been documented.

Popularity

The Age of Innocence became a favourite of the public and, according to Martin Postle, "the commercial face of childhood",

Royal Academy.^[1] The title Grozer invented began to be used popularly for the painting and later, it was used knowingly as the title of a 1920 novel by Edith Wharton

.

References and sources

References

^
ISBN 0903679094

^ British Museum, The Age of Innocence.

Sources

Sir Joshua ReynoldsThe Age of Innocence ?1788 at tate.org.uk

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[Postle-1] 
ISBN 0903679094

[2] British Museum, The Age of Innocence.

[1]