"Children of the Gilded Era: Portraits by Sargent, Renoir, Cassatt, and their Contemporaries presents a compelling selection of children's portraits painted at the end of the nineteenth century - an age of Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton. The featured paintings by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Lawrence Ahna-Tadema, Edgar Degas, and James McNeill Whistler, some of the leading artists of this pivotal period in the histories of the United States and Europe, offer an idyllic view of yesterday's childhood." "Well-known examples such as John Singer Sargent's delightful Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, with its enchanting garden scene of Polly and Dolly, daughters of the artist Frederick Barnard, lighting paper lanterns, or the collective family groups such as The Artist's Family by the French Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir, showing his wife and children with their nurse, are featured alongside lesser-known, but equally endearing, works sharing both the formal and informal moments of a bygone age."--Jacket.