18th Century Babywearing
Last updated: Jan 5, 2024
Babywearing – primarily on the mother’s back, but sometimes in the form of other baby slings – tends only to appear when the mother seems to be in the middle of walking for a significant distance. In England and western Europe, this tends to be more frequently seen with poor women (such as beggars and gypsies), but babywearing appears in illustrations from other cultures in the 18th century as well.
(Babywearing in the 14th-17th centuries is covered elsewhere on this website.)
- War Scene by Sebastiaen Vrancx, 17th century
- Cries of London: The beggar, c. 1688?
- Eh mon mary, point tant de vanité (Ah, my husband, do not be so vain. Without the dragoons and the monks you would hardly have a family) and Mon poupart ne m'empeche pas de travailler En ville (My baby does not stop me from working in the city) from a series of watercolors by Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, c. 1740-1775
- The Industrious 'Prentice out of his Time, & Married to his Master's Daughter by William Hogarth, 1747
- The March of the Guards to Finchley by William Hogarth, c. 1749-1750
- Crippled soldier with family, c. 1760
- The young gipsy, 1762
- Rural view from a collection of prints, including a man with a staff and a woman with a baby on her back walking in the foreground, 1763
- A soldier’s wife begging by Daniel Chodowiecki, 1764
- A beggar woman carrying a baby on her back, 1769
- The Country Maids Fortune Told, 1772
- Returng from Reading Market in a full breese, 1773
- Six-pence a day, 1775
- The Disbanded Soldier. So shall Desert in Arms be crown’d., 1775
- Collection of costumes from Spain: peasant woman from the mountains near Burgos, with a baby carrier on her back, 1777
- An elderly travelling beggar who carries his young wife on his back; she carries a child on her back and a basket on her head, c. 1780-1790
- A peasant woman standing, carrying a child on her back and another in her arms, c. 1780-1839
- A Collection of Etchings after the Most Eminent Masters of the Dutch and Flemish Schools: a man with a baby tied on his back, c. 1782-1803
- The Gypsie Fortune-Teller, 1783
- A Woman of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1784
- A woman carrying a baby strapped to her back holds out her hand to lead two little girls away from a seated woman, c. 1785-1840
- View of the Eagle Tower at Caernarvon, including a woman who carries a child on her back while she knits, 1786
- The Jovial Crew or Merry Beggars: A comic opera as performed at Brighton by the Carleton Company, 1786
- A ballad-seller, 1790s
- A Tatar Boatwoman from an album of 82 drawings of China by William Alexander, 1793-1796
- Sir Roger de Coverley and the Gypsies by Thomas Stothard, late 18th century or early 19th century
- McCord Museum M187, an Iroquois cradleboard, c. 1800-1830
- Country Woman in Picturesque Representations of the Dress and Manners of the English
- Portrait of Mrs. Gwyn, Alc Rolls’ nurse by George O. Delamotte
- Scottish Peasant Women by James Ward
(H/T to Klára Posekaná, who shared her research on this topic.)