Children Spinning Tops

John Glendall is a British painter known for his landscapes of Devon, and his love of recording the medieval buildings of Exeter. He was a servant before his work was discovered by an employee of the print-seller Rudolf Ackerman; he became the firm’s manager. He was an illustrator and draughtsman of aquatint engravings as well as a developer of the new art of lithography. In 1861 he was involved in the creation of a museum in Exeter, however he was to die before the museum opened.

In the Victorian period, paintings of children were thought to be intellectually undemanding and were often dismissed by critics, due to their sentimentality. But sentimentality was found across many forms of Victorian art and entertainment and the sharing of emotion was an important part of Victorian culture.

Relayed in these images is the new Victorian concept of childhood as a time of innocence: a separate state from adulthood to be protected and prolonged.