Gyermekábrázolások az otthon kultúrájából – polgári gyermekszemlélet a magyar biedermeier festészetben
Portraits of Children from the Culture of the Home – Bourgeois Child View in Hungarian Biedermeier Painting

Summary/Abstract: Biedermeier art, reflecting the bourgeois culture and mentality of reform-era Hungary, was the style of the citizen longing for the idyll of home, growing stronger in the narrow circle of their family, thus expressing their forms of social consciousness and experience, and as a result the themes of home, family and childhood became important motifs and themes in the literature and fine arts of the period. The works of Biedermeier painters trace the educational values and aims of the time, the ideological and child-centred patterns of the Enlightenment’s rationalist legacy, and with it the Aufclerism, and the religious moralising bourgeois-puritan ethic of the age, which, in combination, created a total control of childhood, in the belief that the key to national prosperity lay in the education of the child, who was the pledge of family and national continuity. In this paper, I will analyse the representations of children by Biedermeier painters of the Reformation period (portraits of boys and girls, mother-child relationships, images of family) in order to explore the patterns of child-viewing that can be discerned in them, with a view to identifying the more important aspects of the period, the major ideological, mental, childhood, artistic and aesthetic contexts associated with the Biedermeier style, seeking, among other things, to answer the question of how these are interrelated in the works. In my analysis, I approach the works from an examination of the Enlightenment’s rationalist, aufclerist legacy, and the virtue system of puritan ethics that continues to be handed down, as well as from an interpretation of the Biedermeier phenomenon from an ideological-historical perspective.

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