Toddler Boy in Suspenders with Older Girl, Outdoor Garden Furniture, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Toddler Boy in Suspenders with Older Girl, Outdoor Garden Furniture, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Toddler Boy in Suspenders with Older Girl, Outdoor Garden Furniture, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-33D47F

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Sometime in the 1950s, a toddler in his best white shirt and clip-on suspenders was placed in a slatted metal lawn chair and left to form his own opinion of the arrangement, which appears from his expression to have been negative. The older girl beside him — a sister, almost certainly, given the practiced efficiency with which she is attending to his shoes — had been assigned the job of keeping him presentable, a duty that in this era fell automatically to whatever female child was nearest in age. The whole scene is a backyard Sunday afternoon, the kind that followed church or a family lunch and required the children to sit still in their good clothes long enough for the adults to feel the occasion had been properly marked. He is not sitting still. The suspenders, which were considered both practical and natty on small boys of the period, are doing their best work holding his shorts up while he makes his bid for freedom, and she is blocking the exit with the calm authority of someone who has done this before.

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