Seen & Heard: Victorian Children in the Frame

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Seen & Heard, an exhibition at the City of London Corporation’s Guildhall Art Gallery, features 50 Victorian paintings exploring the changing role of children in Victorian Britain.

With paintings from the Guildhall Art Gallery’s own collection and important pieces loaned by Tate Britain and Royal Academy on display, the exhibition will include works by artists such as Pre-Raphaelite pioneer, John Everett Millais, and Thomas Webster RA, which cast the era in a new light.

In the first 14 years of Queen Victoria’s 61-year reign, she gave birth to nine children. With so many of her young children in the public eye, the monarch set family values at the heart of her reign. Her lifestyle of motherhood inspired the upper classes to seek domestic happiness and caused many to look at the plight of young children forced to work in the dangerous and lonely conditions of the factories and mines.