The wall text for Little Women, Little Men at the Frye tells us that the show of children's portraits from 19th-century America is about the shift in the way early Euro-Americans thought about children. First came the Puritan idea of kids as little imps, with all the desires and violence of adults but none of the spiritual discipline and moral restraint. (Which is weirdly Freudian: kid-as-id.) Then came Locke, who revived the Aristotelian idea of the tabula rasa—children are born neither good nor evil. Then came Rousseau, who saw children as noble savages who haven't yet been civilized into corrupt, simpering shits. The culture followed the philosophy, and kids went from beasts to cherubs.

It's an interesting discussion, but those ideas aren't evident in the paintings. That the children were thought to be worth painting is affection of a kind. But the children themselves are ciphers, their expressions blank, their stiff bodies rendered in simple geometry, flat colors, and very little dimension, as if imagined by wheelwrights. Contrast these Stepford kids to the wee cherubs painted by Ludwig Zumbusch (at the turn of the century) in the Frye's permanent collection gallery. Those are painted with gentle smiles and apple cheeks, in romantic soft focus. The typical Zumbusch child looks like someone you'd bounce on your knee. The typical child in Little Women looks like something you'd use to crack open a coconut.

Which isn't to say that contemplating them isn't a pleasure—it's just a more ambivalent pleasure than the painters, or their patrons, intended. The pictures are rough-hewn folk art, made by itinerant painters called limners who were usually self-taught. (And, if this show is any indication, usually had great names: Asa Ames, Ammi Phillips, Erastus Salisbury Field.)

Two Boys in Green Tunics, by an unknown painter, is typical of the show—the boys' faces have blank expressions and color-stamped cheeks, their heads round, heavy, and white, like ivory globes. Each of the boys' eyes is off-center and looking in a different direction, as if afflicted with some congenital condition. But they are sweetly arm-in-arm, standing in a hastily sketched green field, holding toy whips—though the hand of one boy, clutching the arm of the other, is weirdly transparent, as if the painter couldn't be bothered to fill it in. The sky is a dark, stormy bruise.

The rest of the paintings are equally unsettling: tables that seem to come out of nowhere; a dog so out of proportion he looks like he's about to eat the child next to him; everyone pale and with clumsily painted, translucent body parts, as if they are little ghosts.

The show's only actual ghost is Edward W. Gorham, also known as The Little Hammerer, by Joseph Whiting Stock. He is sitting on a brown floor, his hands mischievously hammering nails into the seat of a chair. The painting was commissioned after the child died, and seems more detailed and more humane (this little ghost is the only one engaged in a real activity) than the others. It is as if the boy's death lent him a value missing from the rest of the subjects. It is as if Stock painted the boy carefully, with the painful awareness that his likeness would be all that the world ever got of little Edward W. Gorham.

brendan@thestranger.com