Trust Lucian Freud to look at his own infant child with the same rigorous eye he turned on his paintings of adults. The baby’s head is huge – a bulbous punch of brown, cream and grey – in his 1961 portrait of Bella Freud. In fact, it is big enough to loom at you down a long gallery at Chatsworth House and draw you magnetically towards it to get a look at how the ridged, rucked and scrunched up features are rendered larger than life as Bella sleeps on a sofa, fists formidably clenched. Her left eyelid is very slightly open, revealing a yellow eyeball.
Unsentimental it may be, but Bella is a ball of mighty life. You sense the artist is amazed by the autonomy, energy and will this little creature exhibits. She is a giant in his eyes. Babyhood, toddlerdom, childhood, adolescence – they slip away so fast, as we try to catch the ever-changing miracle of a growing person. Picturing Childhood, the title of Chatsworth’s eye-opening show scattered through its immense baroque halls and chambers, is something we mostly do today with our phones. How lucky to be a Freud, able to portray your child with such monumental profundity.
More than 300 years before him, the Flemish artist Cornelis de Vos did something similar. He too painted his young daughter, but where Freud’s baby sprawls untamed and unsocialised on a sofa, Magdalena de Vos stands up straight in a fine red dress with a wide lacy collar, looking at her father with a dimpled intelligence as she patiently poses.
It’s a contrast that seems to set up simple, well-worn cliches about the ways children have been depicted in art, and how childhood has been socially defined, down the centuries. In the olden days, we are told, kids were not allowed to be kids. They were seen and treated as small adults, fiercely disciplined to perform their future roles in the social order. Picturing Childhood shows it’s not that simple. Yes, De Vos is dressed in a child’s version of adult 17th-century costume, but a grin seems about to break out and the artist is clearly delighted by her pudgy cheeks and hands: she is joyously not an adult. Her precocious good manners emphasise the playfulness of her innocence. She’s cute, in a word, and the artist wants us to know that.
From the earliest works in this show, it’s clear there never was a time when adults didn’t see children as children. Where would Renaissance paintings of the Virgin and Child be without a knowledge of how babies behave and how they interact with their mothers? An extraordinary drawing by Raphael proves that Renaissance artists got that understanding by keen observation. In 1512 or 13, he delicately sketched a young woman with a book in one hand while she cuddles a small child with the other. She’s absorbed in her reading while the infant stares at us. It’s possible the woman is reading aloud to the child. Or maybe she is reading for herself, a lower-class woman looking after someone else’s child who needs the distraction. Either way, this masterpiece of metalpoint drawing is a touchingly intimate glimpse of real life over half a millennium ago.
Tudor childhood doesn’t seem so bad either. Lady Arabella Stuart, painted in 1577, may have been trussed up in grownup clothes for her portrait but she has also been allowed to hold her favourite doll. And it looks exactly like the Queen of the time, Elizabeth I herself. Is this the Tudor equivalent of giving a girl an empowering Barbie?
Even in the tormented 17th century, when religious anxiety and revolution shook Britain, kids were recognised as kids. In a painting of an unknown family by William Dobson, done just before or during the Civil War, the husband and wife appear to be Puritans, clad in black, but their four children are more brightly dressed, and allowed a pet rabbit, fruit and flowers.
So it may seem childhood is eternal and unchanging – but not quite. There’s a real change in the 18th century when young portrait subjects are allowed much more spontaneity. In a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, lifts her arm to playfully mirror her small daughter who has both arms wildly raised up. Their eyes meet in loving communication as Reynolds captures what anyone would recognise as a natural moment between mother and baby. Nearby, the daughters and sons of the Earl of Bute are shown by Johan Zoffany in the 1760s playing in the garden, climbing a tree, jumping on a bench, sporting a bow and arrow.
There’s even a rare relic of this 18th-century cult of childhood: a baby carriage designed by the architect William Kent, in the shape of a giant scallop shell with sculpted snakes twining round. It was designed to be pulled by a goat as a young Devonshire child, godlike, surveyed the estate.
As an exploration of childhood, this exhibition could be accused of being a very privileged social history. Not only the ancestral baby buggy but most of the art, including the Raphael and the Freud, belongs to the Duke of Devonshire whose seat this is. But Chatsworth also gives pleasure to the many with its vast gardens, complete with a 300-year-old water cascade that I’m sure children still splash in. This exhibition is partly an attempt to bring the family fun indoors too, giving younger visitors interactive entertainment amid the formal interiors of the house: it includes soft furniture you can lie on to look at the painted ceilings, food smells to guess in the dining room, and an optical device by the artist Abigail Reynolds that lets you scan the Painted Hall through the eyes of a hawk.
They will have to watch the children like hawks if they expect their play to be as neat as a Tudor child’s ruff. But this is an exhibition full of life and insight that opens up art and history to all. It is funny and moving and you’ll wish you too had a house full of painted children.
• Picturing Childhood, at Chatsworth House, runs from 16 March-6 October
