The Boy in the Painting Died Before Hogarth Finished It

In 1742 William Hogarth painted the four children of a London apothecary. They appear cheerful, holding hands, surrounded by toys. It's a bright picture.

Two things are hidden in it. On top of the clock, a figure of Time holding a scythe. And in one corner, a cat watching a caged canary.

There's a third thing, which isn't painted at all: the youngest boy died while Hogarth was still working on the canvas. He finished him anyway, alive, smiling, hand in hand with his brother and sisters.

A portrait was always a marker

Before photography, nobody had a portrait painted by accident. It was expensive and it took weeks. So people sat at particular moments: childhood, marriage, the inheriting of a title, old age.

Which makes old portraiture a map of the hinges of a life. People stopped to be recorded exactly when something was changing.

That made me look at my phone differently. I have eight hundred pictures of an ordinary Sunday and not one from the week we moved house.

The sitter's age is the painter's decision

This is the part that caught me off guard.

Historians often cannot work out what age a sitter was meant to look, even knowing the birth date, the death date and the date of the sitting. Because the painter decided.

Elizabeth I is the extreme case: her portraits held the same young woman's face for decades while the real woman aged perfectly normally away from the canvas.

The portraitist worked between two pressures that don't reconcile: likeness and flattery. He could record the marks of time honestly, he could erase them, he could paint children as small adults.

Every portrait is an answer to that question. Record, or flatter.

Children painted as miniature adults

Velázquez painted the Infanta Margarita several times. In one portrait from 1659 she stands in a blue dress, in the formal pose of an adult, wearing the contained expression the court required.

Then you look at the hands. They're tiny hands inside an enormous garment. And the mouth is doing a small pout that no amount of protocol managed to remove.

The whole picture is trying to say here is an important person, and the body is saying here is a child.

From the seventeenth century onward this began to shift, and portraits started insisting on the difference between children and adults instead of disguising it. By the nineteenth century, Romanticism was openly celebrating childhood as its own thing.

If you photograph a child, yours or anyone's: the images that age best are not the well-behaved ones. They're the ones that catch the crooked posture, the sideways look, the thing an adult would never do in front of a camera.

Wrinkles recorded on purpose

It's worth looking at the other end of a life too.

One of the earliest free-standing portraits in northern Europe is Jan van Eyck's Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, from around 1432. There's no flattery in it: crow's feet, a thin neck, a receding hairline. It's all on the panel.

Van Eyck made a silverpoint study first and wrote the colours he intended by hand on the sheet itself. He was working with a technique that was new at the time, oil paint, which allowed a nuance of light and shade nobody had had before. He used the new tool to record an old face precisely.

That wasn't a cultural accident. Roman portrait busts showed sunken flesh and hollow eyes too, in a culture that read age as authority. The Italian Renaissance revived it for cardinals and popes.

There have been whole centuries in which ageing in a portrait was the point rather than the problem.

A series beats a perfect picture

This is the idea I took home and actually started doing.

Sofonisba Anguissola painted herself throughout her life. Twelve self-portraits survive, spanning decades. She lived past ninety.

Helene Schjerfbeck made more than twenty self-portraits between the ages of seventy-seven and eighty-three. Twenty, in six years.

No single one of those pictures is the "best portrait" of either woman. What's remarkable is the sequence. Being able to watch one face make different decisions about itself over time.

I don't paint. But I can sit in the same chair, in the same light, once a year, and take a photograph. So can you.

What I started doing after reading this

Four practical things, none of which needs equipment:

Photograph the hinges, not only the pretty days. The last week in the old flat. The first day of the new job. The difficult birthday. Those are the ones that gain weight later.

Decide in advance whether a picture is meant to flatter or to record. Both are legitimate. The trouble comes from wanting both at once, which is how we end up with three hundred near-identical photographs and not one true one.

Hang the older faces too. Cultures that valued experience gave wrinkles pride of place. A wall of only young faces tells half your family's story.

Make a series. Same chair, same wall, once a year. In ten years you'll have something no single photograph can be.

Back to the boy

I keep thinking about Hogarth in front of that canvas, knowing, and finishing it anyway.

He could have taken the boy out. He could have turned the picture into a memorial, full of mourning symbols, which his century knew perfectly well how to do. He chose to leave four children holding hands, cheerful, with the cat and the scythe sitting in the background for anyone who cared to look.

It might be the closest painting gets to saying that the picture of an ordinary Sunday counts too.

So let me ask: when did you last take a photograph of yourself, on purpose, that wasn't to send to anybody? It took me a while to answer that one.

Read next

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