Painted Girls

In Europe, some early paintings featuring girls were Petrus Christus' Portrait of a Young Girl (about 1460), Juan de Flandes' Portrait of a Young Girl (about 1505), Frans Hals' Die Amme mit dem Kind in 1620, Diego Velázquez' Las Meninas in 1656, Jan Steen's The Feast of St. Nicolas (about 1660) and Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring along with Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. Later paintings of girls include Albert Anker's portrait of a Girl with a Domino Tower and Camille Pissarro's 1883 Portrait of a Felix Daughter.
Mary Cassatt painted many famous Impressionist works that idealize the innocence of girls and the mother-daughter bond, for example her 1884 work Children on the Beach During the same era, Whistler's Harmony in Gray and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander and The White Girl depict girls in the same light.
The European children's literature canon includes many notable works with young female protagonists. Traditional fairy tales have preserved memorable stories about girls. Among these are Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Rapunzel, The Princess and the Pea and the Brothers Grimm's Little Red Riding Hood. Well-known children's books about girls include Alice in Wonderland, Heidi, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Nancy Drew series, Little House on the Prairie, Madeline, Pippi Longstocking, A Wrinkle in Time, Dragonsong, and Little Women.
Beginning in the late Victorian era, more nuanced depictions of girl protagonists became popular. Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, The Little Mermaid, and other tales featured themes that ventured into tragedy. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll featured a widely noted female protagonist confronting eccentric characters and intellectual puzzles in surreal settings. Moreover, Carroll's controversial photographs of girls are often cited in histories of photographic art. Literature followed different cultural currents, sometimes romanticizing and idealizing girlhood, and at other times developing under the influence of the growing literary realism movement. Many Victorian novels begin with the childhood of their heroine, such as Jane Eyre, an orphan who suffers ill treatment from her guardians and then at a girls' boarding school. The character Natasha in War and Peace, on the other hand, is sentimentalized.