Section 1: The Miraculous Power of Grotesquerie

Social conventions from about 1800 to 1865, when the genre was at its peak, often make discerning the gender of the young sitter difficult. Specifically, girls and boys in the nineteenth century donned similar hairstyles, clothing, and jewelry throughout their youth, a circumstance that necessitated the inclusion of thematic signifiers to establish the distinction between masculine from female reveal much about nineteenth-century notions of gender.

Ammi Phillips’s paired Boy in Red and Girl in Red are exemplary of these paradigms. Because the dress worn by the male subject is identical to that of his female counterpart, the props are crucial clues as to the genders of the sitters. The boy’s hammer is suggestively placed to both indicate the phallus and connote noise and control, qualities deemed unfeminine at the time. By contrast, the girl holds ripe strawberries over her womb, portending her future fertility. The props in both images not only help distinguish male and female but also reveal the enduring binaries of the time—the agency afforded to the male sitter by his phallic implement is wholly absent from Girl in Red, reflecting socially determined distinctions common during the nineteenth century.