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Genre art is the pictorial representation in any of various media of scenes or events from everyday life,[1] such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, work, and street scenes. Such representations (also calledgenre works,genre scenes, orgenre views) may be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Some variations of the termgenre art specify the medium or type of visual work, as ingenre painting,genre prints,genre photographs, and so on.
The following concentrates on painting, but genremotifs were also extremely popular in many forms of thedecorative arts, especially from theRococo of the early 18th century onwards. Single figures or small groups decorated a huge variety of objects such asporcelain, furniture,wallpaper, and textiles.
Genre painting, also calledgenre scene orpetit genre, depicts aspects ofeveryday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attached either individually or collectively—thus distinguishingpetit genre fromhistory paintings (also calledgrand genre) andportraits. A work would often be considered as a genre work even if it could be shown that the artist had used a known person—a member of his family, say—as a model. In this case it would depend on whether the work was likely to have been intended by the artist to be perceived as a portrait—sometimes a subjective question. The depictions can be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Because of their familiar and frequently sentimental subject matter, genre paintings have often proven popular with thebourgeoisie, ormiddle class. Genre themes appear in nearly all art traditions. Painted decorations in ancientEgyptian tombs often depict banquets, recreation, and agrarian scenes, andPeiraikos is mentioned byPliny the Elder as aHellenistic panel painter of "low" subjects, such as survive inmosaic versions and provincial wall-paintings atPompeii: "barbers' shops, cobblers' stalls, asses, eatables and similar subjects".[2] Medievalilluminated manuscripts often illustrated scenes of everyday peasant life, especially in theLabours of the Months in the calendar section ofbooks of hours, most famouslyLes Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
TheLow Countries dominated the field until the 18th century, and in the 17th century bothFlemish Baroque painting andDutch Golden Age painting produced numerous specialists who mostly painted genre scenes. In the previous century, the FlemishRenaissance painterJan Sanders van Hemessen painted innovative large-scale genre scenes, sometimes including a moral theme or a religious scene in the background in the first half of the 16th century. These were part of a pattern of "Mannerist inversion" inAntwerp painting, giving "low" elements previously in the decorative background of images prominent emphasis.Joachim Patinir expandedhis landscapes, making the figures a small element, andPieter Aertsen painted works dominated by spreads ofstill life food and genre figures of cooks or market-sellers, with small religious scenes in spaces in the background.Pieter Brueghel the Elder made peasants and their activities, very naturalistically treated, the subject of many of his paintings, and genre painting was to flourish in Northern Europe in Brueghel's wake.
Adriaen andIsaac van Ostade,Jan Steen,Adriaen Brouwer,David Teniers,Aelbert Cuyp,Johannes Vermeer andPieter de Hooch were among the many painters specializing in genre subjects in the Low Countries during the 17th century. The generally small scale of these artists' paintings was appropriate for their display in the homes of middle class purchasers. Often the subject of a genre painting was based on a popularemblem from anemblem book. This can give the painting a double meaning, such as inGabriel Metsu'sThe Poultry seller, 1662, showing an old man offering arooster in a symbolic pose that is based on a lewd engraving by Gillis van Breen (1595–1622), with the same scene.[3] Themerry company showed a group of figures at a party, whether making music at home or just drinking in a tavern. Other common types of scenes showed markets or fairs, village festivities ("kermesse"), or soldiers in camp.
InItaly, a "school" of genre painting was stimulated by the arrival inRome of the Dutch painterPieter van Laer in 1625. He acquired the nickname "Il Bamboccio" and his followers were called theBamboccianti, whose works would inspireGiacomo Ceruti,Antonio Cifrondi, andGiuseppe Maria Crespi among many others.
Louis le Nain was an important exponent of genre painting in 17th-century France, painting groups of peasants at home, where the 18th century would bring a heightened interest in the depiction of everyday life, whether through theromanticized paintings ofWatteau andFragonard, or the carefulrealism ofChardin.Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) and others painted detailed and rather sentimental groups or individual portraits of peasants that were to be influential on 19th-century painting.
In England,William Hogarth (1697–1764) conveyed comedy, social criticism and moral lessons through canvases that told stories of ordinary people full of narrative detail (aided by long sub-titles), often in serial form, as in hisA Rake's Progress, first painted in 1732–33, then engraved and published in print form in 1735.
Spain had a tradition predatingThe Book of Good Love of social observation and commentary based on the Old Roman Latin tradition, practiced by many of its painters andilluminators. At the height ofthe Spanish Empire and the beginning of its slow decline, manypicaresque genre scenes of street life—as well as the kitchen scenes known asbodegones—were painted by the artists of TheSpanish Golden Age, notablyVelázquez (1599–1660) andMurillo (1617–82). More than a century later, the Spanish artistFrancisco de Goya (1746–1828) used genre scenes in painting andprintmaking as a medium for dark commentary on the human condition. HisThe Disasters of War, a series of 82 genre incidents from thePeninsular War, took genre art to unprecedented heights of expressiveness.
With the decline of religious and historical painting in the 19th century, artists increasingly found their subject matter in the life around them.Realists such asGustave Courbet (1819–77) upset expectations by depicting everyday scenes in huge paintings—at the scale traditionally reserved for "important" subjects—thus blurring the boundary which had set genre painting apart as a "minor" category.History painting itself shifted from the exclusive depiction of events of great public importance to the depiction of genre scenes in historical times, both the private moments of great figures, and the everyday life of ordinary people. In French art this was known as theTroubador style. This trend, already apparent by 1817 whenIngres paintedHenri IV Playing with His Children, culminated in thepompier art of French academicians such asJean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) andJean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–91). In the second half of the century interest in genre scenes, often in historical settings or with pointed social or moral comment, greatly increased across Europe.
William Powell Frith (1819–1909) was perhaps the most famous English genre painter of the Victorian era, painting large and extremely crowded scenes; the expansion in size and ambition in 19th-century genre painting was a common trend. Other 19th-century English genre painters includeAugustus Leopold Egg,Frederick Daniel Hardy,[4]George Elgar Hicks,William Holman Hunt andJohn Everett Millais. Scotland produced two influential genre painters,David Allan (1744–96) andSir David Wilkie (1785–1841). Wilkie'sThe Cottar's Saturday Night (1837) inspired a major work by the French painterGustave Courbet,After Dinner at Ornans (1849). FamousRussian realist painters likePavel Fedotov,Vasily Perov, andIlya Repin also produced genre paintings.
In Germany,Carl Spitzweg (1808–85) specialized in gently humorous genre scenes, and in ItalyGerolamo Induno (1825–90) painted scenes of military life. Subsequently, theImpressionists, as well as such 20th-century artists asPierre Bonnard,Itshak Holtz,Edward Hopper, andDavid Park painted scenes of daily life. But in the context of modern art the term "genre painting" has come to be associated mainly with painting of an especially anecdotal or sentimental nature, painted in a traditionally realistic technique.
The first true genre painter in the United States was the German immigrantJohn Lewis Krimmel, who learning from Wilkie and Hogarth, produced gently humorous scenes of life in Philadelphia from 1812 to 1821. Other notable 19th-century genre painters from the United States includeGeorge Caleb Bingham,William Sidney Mount, andEastman Johnson.Harry Roseland[5] focused on scenes of poor African Americans in the post-American Civil War South,[6] andJohn Rogers (1829–1904) was a sculptor whose small genre works, mass-produced in cast plaster, were immensely popular in America. The works of American painterErnie Barnes (1938–2009) and those of illustratorNorman Rockwell (1894–1978) could exemplify a more modern type of genre painting.
Japaneseukiyo-e prints are rich in depictions of people at leisure and at work, as areKorean paintings, particularly those created in the 18th century.
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While genre painting began, in the 17th century, with representations by Europeans of European life, the invention and early development of photography coincided with the most expansive and aggressive era of European imperialism, in the mid-to-late 19th century, and so genre photographs, typically made in the proximity of military, scientific and commercial expeditions, often also depict the people of other cultures that Europeans encountered throughout the world.
Although the distinctions are not clear, genre works should be distinguished fromethnographic studies, which are pictorial representations resulting from direct observation and descriptive study of the culture and way of life of particular societies, and which constitute one class of products of such disciplines asanthropology and thebehavioural sciences.
The development of photographic technology to make cameras portable and exposures instantaneous enabled photographers to venture beyond the studio to follow other art forms in the depiction of everyday life. This category has come to be known asstreet photography.[7][8][9]
