The portrait of the Foote sisters — Anna and Amelia — dating from around 1860 appears early in “Children of the Elm City,” the new exhibit at the New Haven Museum running now through winter 2022. It’s in the first section of the exhibit, dedicated to portraiture from the 18th and 19th centuries, before the advent of widespread photography.
Because the exhibit is partially geared toward children, a lot of questions appear in the text accompanying the exhibit. One might not expect those questions to be as provocative as they are.
“Are these paintings representative of most of the children of New Haven during this time?” the exhibit asks. “What would the lifestyle of these families need to be in order to have a portrait done of their children? Would these have been families from the working class, middle class or upper class? Would you expect to find formally painted portraits of enslaved children living in New Haven?”
The questions dive right into the complex past of the city, calling to mind its history as a place for manufacturing and reminding readers that, in fact, slaves were sold on the New Haven Green until 1825 and slavery wasn’t fully abolished in Connecticut until 1848. In doing so, the questions call attention as much to what’s missing from this vivid exhibit, and perhaps the New Haven Museum’s collection (from which it’s drawn), as it does to what’s there. That the museum’s collection of artifacts featuring children is skewed isn’t a knock on the museum. It speaks to the broader sense of who is more likely to be able to create and preserve portraits and photographs. It provokes a series of thoughts about how this bias affects our view of the past, and underlines the need for efforts — such as the Black New Haven Archive — to counteract it.
At the same time, we learn about the people who do appear in the exhibit, with just enough detail to humanize them all. We learn, for example, that Anna and Amelia had four siblings, and that four of the six children — including Anna — died before reaching adulthood. Another portrait, by Elizabeth Gilbert Jerome of her brother Amos, was painted from memory after Amos died in the Civil War at the age of 22. In the painting, though, Elizabeth depicted Amos as a child of 10. “Why did she choose to depict him as a child and not as the young man he was at the time of his death?” the exhibit asks. “Could you recall and recreate the face of a loved one who passed many years earlier? Could you do it if little or no photographic evidence existed of that person?” The questions encourage kids to both wonder about the artist’s motives while admiring her skill.
The exhibit relates that photography came to New Haven in a big way; by 1890 there were 21 camera studios listed in New Haven’s city directory. Cartes de visite were particularly popular in the second half of the 19th century, with parents sharing pictures of their children with family and friends. Here the questions in the exhibit reveal definitively that they’re aimed as much at adults as children. “Did your family distribute pictures of you as a child? Did you do the same with pictures of your own children?” the accompanying text asks. It relates that “most of the photographs in the collection were passed down through the family before they were donated to the New Haven Museum.”
It then asks a particularly pointed question: “Where do you think your childhood pictures will end up? How will they get there?” It reminds New Haveners that making sure the city’s historical record accurately represents the population is something everyone can actively participate in — even if people rarely make hard copies of photographs any more. Perhaps the next iteration of the same exhibit, in a few decades, will feature a section of digital images projected on the wall.
The spread of photography appears to have had a democratizing influence on the historical record in the Elm City, as more of its population is represented in it. The accompanying text notes that people have gathered on the New Haven Green since the days of the New Haven Colony, and for a variety of reasons. The photograph of the two boys is undated, and “while we do not know what brought the two little boys … to downtown New Haven that day, their smart suits, flowers in their hands, the other people gathered with Trinity Church as a backdrop, provide some clues. Why do you think they were there?”
No picture quite captures the breadth of representation of New Haven’s youth like the picture of kids gathered for United Nations Day in 1967.
But public-school class pictures emerge as another case in which broader representation happens. This class, from 1925, isn’t nearly as demographically diverse as a random sampling of New Haven’s high school students would be today, but there are glimmers of the city to come. Just as with class photos now, the kids’ individual personalities have a way of shining through, in ways that pictures of adults don’t always offer. Some faces are serious. Others seem ready to tell a joke, or pull a prank. A couple look lost in thought. One or two seem frightened. Haircuts, clothes, and quality of photograph aside, they could be faces from today.
That the exhibit stops in the 1960s suggests that the New Haven Museum could use some more photographs of kids, from more recent years. Getting those photos to the museum, however, is as much a task for the people of New Haven generally as it is for the staff of the museum. “Children of the Elm City” suggests that it’s altogether worth it. Even a collection of school class photographs — to say nothing of, say, pictures of families at Lighthouse Point in the summer, or pictures of kids riding bikes in the Hill, or walking with their parents down Grand Avenue in Fair Haven — placed alongside the photos and portraits in the exhibit, could allow the viewer to see, in the blink of an eye, where the city has been and to some extent, where it’s going.
“Children of the Elm City” runs at the New Haven Museum, 114 Whitney Ave., through winter 2022. Visit the museum’s website for hours and information on how to visit.