Portret van jongen en meisje bij een boom 1840 - 1843

This print by Wilhelmus Cornelis Chimaer van Oudendorp depicts a boy and girl seated beneath a tree. The image evokes the genre of the society portrait, particularly fashionable in Europe at the time. Though the print medium democratized image production, allowing the middle classes to consume art, we can still ask, who were these children? The composition alludes to their potential status, their placement within an idealized landscape representing wealth and leisure. The tree under which the children sit acts as a kind of proscenium arch, staging them for our view. Prints such as this offer social historians rich source material, enabling us to explore questions of class identity and artistic consumption in the Netherlands in the 19th century. Examining estate inventories or periodical advertisements might reveal more about the sitters and the market for this kind of portraiture. This would allow us to understand the relationship between art, commerce, and the construction of social status during this period.