Genre Painting

The term "genre painting" appeared for the first time in the academic French artistic theory by Quatremère de Quincy (Considérations sur les arts du dessin en France, 1791) and refers to the "scène bourgeoise" (middle-class scene). This category of subject deals with the representation of everyday life or the depiction of anonymous stories conceived without any reference to historical, religious, or literary sources. Genre painting itself existed before the term, and its practitioners include iconic artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Johannes Vermeer, Jean Siméon Chardin, or Jean-Baptiste Greuze. But, its categorization is nothing else than a pure art historical process. Indeed, its history can be related to different currents and subjects in art: French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot himself listed "indistinctively" the painters of "flowers, animals, woods, forests, hills, and scene borrowed from the common life" among the "peintres de genre" (1766). Genre painting also conveys political, moralistic, and allegorical meanings.

Brief History

If we consider the definition provided by Diderot, Quatremère de Quincy, or Schnaase, the genesis of genre painting should be dated from antiquity. The Egyptians seem to have paid attention to the activities of men in the fields, hunters, fishermen, and so forth. Equally attracted by the prosaic dimension of these subjects, the Greeks also covered their ceramics with depictions of traders, banquets, and hunting scenes. Even if those topics were considered "minoris" by Pliny the Elder, the works of such artists as Piraeicus the "rhyparograph" and Antiphilos commanded high prices. During Roman antiquity, topics like pastoral festivities, street musicians, and boutiques were depicted in frescoes and mosaics.

The lack of "profane" scenes that can be dated from the Middle Ages is generally explained by the dominance of sacred themes in works of art and the collateral damages of repeated wars. It is therefore accepted that the rebirth of this genre happened in the republic of Siena during the Trecento. Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1290–1348) offered a detailed illustration of urban activities and festivities in his Allegory of the Good and Bad Government, painted in 1337–1339, paving the way to innovative decorations in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. Miniatures also became an ideal format for domestic scenes. By the end of the thirteenth century, Lombardy’s great artistic centers as well as the northern courts of Italy and Europe—Paris, Avignon, Burgundy—produced many illuminated devotionals, or book of hours, and more profane Tacuinums full of innovative illuminations of both court life and peasant labor. Giovannino de Grassi (1350–1398) or the Limbourg brothers (early fourteenth century) produced refined and sophisticated works for these courts.

The everyday life appears more or less prominently in religious art during the early Renaissance. In Florence, the Banquet of Herod or the Annunciation are filled with lively details taken from reality. In Brussels and Bruges, Robert Campin (1375–1444) or Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) seem sometimes to pay more attention to the interior backgrounds than to the sacred event itself. It is assumed that the cultural and religious context of the second half of the fourteenth century in their country favored the rise of subjects related to human life. One of the milestones of this category, Petrus Christus’ Saint Eligius in His Workshop (1449), has inspired Quentin Metsys’ Moneylenders (1514) and in a certain way, Jan van Hemessen’s grotesque illustrations of chirurgical practice (c. 1550).

As in Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) numerous sketches of grotesque faces (the "visi mostruosi"), Hieronymus Bosch, Jan van Hemessen, Vincenzo Campi and later Annibale Carracci, elaborate an updated depiction of Pliny’s "gryllus" and eventually transform it into a specific genre, appreciated and collected by connoisseurs and amateurs from Antwerp to Venice. With Caravaggio (1583–1610) and his followers all over Europe, from the Bentvueghels in Rome to the Bodegones in Spain, genre painting acquired a new status. Depicting people from the streets, the taverns, or the farm, their pictures feature musicians, courtesans, dealers, gypsies, and often exclude any reference to religion. In a period broadly concerned with the Counter-Reformation, this formed the identity of a new kind of painter whose inspiration was taken from everyday life rather than the Bible. In Paris, the Le Nain brothers built their success on elegant depictions of sober interiors with families of peasants or wanderers. In Delft, Vermeer composed a subtle portrait of the bourgeois’ habits and leisure. Later, between the end of the seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries in Spain (with Murillo), Italy (with Crespi, Ceruti, Longhi, and Traversi), England (with Hogarth), and France (with Chardin and Greuze), genre painting peaked. The artists tended to "overflow the genre," adding universal morality to their works.

Echoing a dramatic event in the Raft of the Medusa (1819), French painter and lithographer Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) defied the academic limits of genre painting. His large canvas rivaled the history paintings, officially considered the highest category. Following his example, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Claude Monet in France and the group of Italian painters called the Macchiaioli showed the new potential of their art—a unique and almost exclusive category of painting to attest the Industrial Revolution, the social revolutions, and the artist’s independence from the Academy. Swiss art critic Jacob Burckhardt wrote Netherland Genre Painting (1874), further popularizing the term genre painting. Genre painting was, by the end of the nineteenth century, the most popular of all the genres in art.

Impact

The obsolete hierarchy of the pictorial genres, established in the late seventeenth century, was deeply transformed in the late nineteenth century. Genre painting became successful and eventually overtook the prominence of history painting, just as the French novelists did in the same period. Social realism became an official matter. This radical evolution should not be dissociated from another phenomenon: the success of genre painting in the art market.

Between the end of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, studies and exhibitions threw more light on genre painting and eventually reevaluated its history. Despite its discredit in the academic debates, this genre was a great success in private collections. Its omnipresence in the Italian inventories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as in Paris, London, Holland, and Flanders, confirms its appreciation among connoisseurs and patrons.

Genre painting’s capacity to combine rough motifs with universal principles and concepts inspire continued studies and new research and finds praise in the modern art market. However, terms such as "realism," "reality," and "low style" are more commonly used in studies of scenes of everyday life.

Bibliography

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