Lietuvos istorijos institutas

The history of art in Vilnius at the turn of the eighteenth-nineteenth century is unimaginable without the person of Franciszek Smuglewicz (1745–1807). His creative and educational activities attracted a great deal of attention, but one aspect of his artistic work – the depiction of the child in his secular paintings – has not been really discussed. The main aim of this article is to identify and define more precisely the directions and nature of the depiction of secular childhood that emerges in Smuglewicz’s work. The works, relevant to this study, are divided into four thematic categories – mythological, historical, reflecting the artist’s period of life, and images of the characters of the little ones, relevant to the theme of citizenship.