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At the very outset of his seminal publication L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien régime, first published in Paris in 1960 and translated into English two years later as Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Ariès introduces himself to his reader as a 'demographic historian'.1It is surely one of the most remarkable aspects of this remarkable book that this 'demographic historian' proceeds to underpin considerable portions of his arguments about children, education and the family with visual material. Indeed, Ariès not only uses canonical works of art in the thesis he unfolds; he incorporates a wide range of objects, from paintings through to tapestries, from engravings to fans, employing an eclectic approach that foreshadows the more recent emphasis of many art historians on a broadly conceived 'visual culture'.2
In his recent biographical study of Ariès, Patrick Hutton elucidated the critical role of the historian's wife, Primerose, in his turn towards the image. Primerose was trained as an art historian, and it was in her company that Ariès began to rummage in the Salle des Estampes at the Bibliotheque Nationale, in search of images of costume across the centuries.3That project gave way to his ground-breaking study of childhood, and he built up a large repository of visual material, adding works of art viewed in Parisian exhibitions of the 1950s and others found in canonical texts, such as Walther Bernt's volumes on seventeenth-century Dutch art, to the engravings by the likes of Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella that he had collected at the library.4Ariès's extensive study of education, which forms the central and most substantial part of Centuries of Childhood, makes only sporadic reference to such images, but his much debated discussion of 'the discovery of childhood', as well as his analysis of the family in the final part of the book, has this visual material at its core.
Ariès uses these objects in a variety of ways. On a few occasions, he deploys the visual to create a mood. Discussing, for example, a new 'vague but definite correlation between early adolescence and the typical soldier' in the eighteenth century, Ariès evokes 'the handsome young soldier depicted by Watteau'.5He also, and more frequently, refers to the inclusion of certain...