The Lavie Children

Johann Zoffany

National Gallery of Art

Three young boys, four girls, and a dark brown dog gather in a loose semi-circle in a grassy clearing near a grove of trees in this horizontal landscape painting. The children all have pale skin with flushed cheeks, brown hair, and dark eyes. The girls wear corseted dresses with long skirts and cap-like bonnets, and the boys wear jackets with tails, knee-length pants, stockings, and black shoes with buckles. The three boys look at us while the four girls look around the scene. A long plank of wood has been laid across a thick, sawed tree trunk to make a seesaw. One boy, wearing fawn brown, sits on one end near the ground, to our left. The oldest girl braces the youngest on the opposite end of the plank, which is lifted into the air. The oldest girl wears a sheer, white apron over a coral-pink dress. Like the other two girls, the youngest child wears a white dress but hers has a pink sash and pink ribbons are tied into her and the oldest girl’s white caps. A boy wearing a moss-green suit looks at us and raises his dark cap in one hand as he stands balanced with his feet widely planted at the center of the angled plank of wood. To our right and closer to us, one of the younger girls, wearing a topaz-blue sash with a blue ribbon in her cap, stands in front of the oldest boy, who holds a tall staff that reaches off the top edge of the painting in the crook of one elbow. This boy holds a small silver fish in both hands. The girl touches one of his hands with her own, and looks up at the fish. The fourth girl and the dog sit on the ground at the front center of the painting. The dog rests its front legs across her lap and she looks off to our right. A pool of water reflects light in the lower right corner of the painting, and a deeply shadowed, verdant forest frames the rightmost third of the composition. Upon closer inspection, we find an open basket and red cloth near the water, almost lost in shadow near the lower right corner of the painting. Beyond the group of children, a tree-filled valley leads back to another body of water and hills in the deep distance to our left, and a few pale gray clouds float across a blue sky.