The Age of Innocence

The story of The Age of Innocence

A small girl in a white muslin dress sits on the grass with her hands folded in her lap, looking off to the side at something we cannot see. Behind her a tree and a pale evening sky. Reynolds painted it around 1788, near the end of his life, and it is at Tate Britain in London. Nobody is certain who the child was, and the title was attached later, but it stuck because it names exactly what the picture is: a moment before anything has happened to her. It was one of the most reproduced paintings of the nineteenth century, on everything from biscuit tins to nursery walls.

On a wall, The Age of Innocence is soft and warm. The dominant colors are the cream and white of the dress, the girl's brown hair, and a background of muted green and dusky gold, so it settles into a room without asking for attention. It is a natural for a nursery, a child's bedroom, a guest room, or a hallway, and it suits English-country, cottage, traditional, and gently feminine interiors. Our source image supports the Mini at 8 × 9.5 in, which is the right scale for this quiet picture: on a nursery shelf, above a small dresser, or in a gallery wall of portraits where it reads as the tender one.

Reynolds's Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse shows what he did with a grown-up sitter. Renoir's A Girl with a Watering Can is the French answer a century later, and Vigée Le Brun's Self-Portrait with Her Daughter is the other great eighteenth-century picture of a child at ease. More from Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Tate canvas, with the softened, slightly faded surface of the original left as it is.