1. Students will take an inventory of the portrait Boy with Toy Horse, noting in words and in sketches details of the work of art.
   
   
2. Is the child in the portrait a boy or a girl? Support your answer with details from the portrait.
   
   
3. Is this dress typical for boys at the time? Why or why not? What sources exist for learning about how people dressed in the eighteenth century? Why are paintings important for learning about history?
   
   
4. Search the collection to find other images of children in the Bayou Bend Collection. Note how boys and girls dressed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Compare clothes for children in the past with clothes for children in the present.
   
   
5. Have student bring in photographs of themselves (or use class photos). Compare the contemporary portraits with those in the Bayou Bend Collection. Why do people have their portraits made? Are the reasons in the twentieth century the same as those in the eighteenth? What can a portrait tell about a person? Who controls that message? The artist? The subject? Why?
   
   
6. Select a portrait of a child from the Bayou Bend Collection and write a letter to a friend, telling him or her about the child as if you had just met him or her. Refer to the appearance, personality, behavior, etc. of the child.

Background Information - Dressing Up

Before the early 1800s, little girls and boys were dressed alike in long skirts. As a practical measure, this custom minimized the difficulty of changing a baby's "clouting" (cheap linen fabric used for diapers), but it also had a symbolic significance in early American society. It was not until age five or six, well past the toilet-training stage, that boys were "breeched" or dressed in pants, in the first ritual of their approaching adulthood and independence. Girls, in contrast, would continue to wear long skirts and confining garments, such as stays, throughout their lives, in visual reference to their dependent state.

Like long skirts, pink and blue were unisex fashions for early American children, used interchangeably for boys and girls. It was only in the early 1900s that the colors began to take on the gender-specific meaning with which they are associated today. The clue to the gender of the toddler in this portrait is not the garment but the toy horse he holds. Clues or attributes that artists typically used to symbolized youth were flowers, birds, pets and games, or toys, all of which were viewed as the last symbols of a soon-to-end childhood.