Jongen met koe op een landweg c. 1850 - 1858

This is Dirk van Lokhorst’s sepia drawing of a young boy with a cow on a country lane, now held in the Rijksmuseum. Van Lokhorst, working in the 19th century, painted in a time of great shifts in how children and rural life were viewed. Here, we find a young boy standing almost as equals with a cow. This image reflects the complex ways childhood was changing. As industrialization drew many to cities, childhood became less about work and more about innocence and education, at least for some. But in rural settings, children like the boy here, were still very much a part of the working world, deeply tied to the land. Consider the boy's gaze; it doesn’t quite meet ours, suggesting a world separate from the viewer. What might it have felt like to be that boy, caught between the labor expected of him and the burgeoning ideals of childhood innocence? Think about how this image creates a narrative about the intertwining of personal identity and labor against a backdrop of shifting social expectations.