About this work
The center of this vertical composition is a young girl caught in a quiet, absorbed moment — Smith's most characteristic subject rendered with her most characteristic grace. The painting presents "a pristine young girl" sharing a reflective moment with a companion , the scene suffused with the warm, close tones that made Smith's palette unmistakable: soft ochres and creamy whites, clothing rendered with tactile delicacy, the child's expression drawn inward rather than performing for any viewer. The original work is mixed media on board, measuring 21.5 × 15.5 inches — proportions that concentrate intimacy and demand close looking. Smith's draftsmanship, disciplined by years of working for major periodicals, gives the figure a structural solidity that her gentler colorwork then seems to dissolve into feeling.
*The Then Lover* belongs to *The Seven Ages of Childhood*, a series of seven paintings Smith made that was first reproduced in *The Ladies' Home Journal* in 1908–09 and then bound in book form with verses by Carolyn Wells. Each image was modelled on lines from Shakespeare's *As You Like It* — this one on the third age: "Then the lover, sighing like a furnace." In Wells's child's-eye reimagining, the lover's ardor is the first stirring of childhood affection — love that "quickly springs and thrives," beginning perhaps with "a favorite doll, often the raggedest of all."
The series as a whole traces the progression of the child from infancy to young motherhood , and this plate sits at its emotional heart: the moment before self-consciousness, when love is still unconditional and unselfaware. The Seven Ages of Childhood (1909) was one of the defining commissions of Smith's most prolific decade, and her picture-book illustrations from this period became some of the most beloved and best known of her time.
On a wall, *The Then Lover* needs room to breathe but not grandeur to justify itself. It belongs in a space where someone reads — a study, a hallway alcove, a child's bedroom that a parent has decorated with adult care. Smith and her circle were considered "the most influential artists of American domestic life at the turn of the twentieth century," whose "poetic, idealized images still prevail as archetypes of motherhood and childhood a century later" — and this work earns that
