Genre painting, also called genre scene or petit genre, depicts aspects of everyday 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 distinguishing petit genre from history paintings (also called grand genre) and portraits. 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 the bourgeoisie, or middle class.
Genre subjects appear in many traditions of art. Painted decorations in ancient Egyptian tombs often depict banquets, recreation, and agrarian scenes, and Peiraikos is mentioned by Pliny the Elder as a Hellenistic panel painter of “low” subjects, such as survive in mosaic versions and provincial wall-paintings at Pompeii: “barbers’ shops, cobblers’ stalls, asses, eatables and similar subjects”. Medieval illuminated manuscripts often illustrated scenes of everyday peasant life, especially in the Labours of the Months in the calendar section of books of hours, most famously the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
A clear distinction from the portrait or group portrait is not always possible. While this mostly identifiable human being shows, genre painting characters are anonymous and characterized by their environment; the interior is often in the foreground.
Sometimes, the transition to landscape painting is fluid, especially in the epoch of Romanticism. In Spain and Latin America, 19th century genre painting is also referred to as costumbrismo.
Many alleged everyday scenes are based more on popular comic plays or proverbs and are therefore often – if not always – narrative in character. For example, an Italian genre painter, the Neapolitan Gaspare Traversi, created his pictures in parallel with the development and heyday of the opera buffa napolitana around the mid-18th century, when the everyday life of the lower social milieu was exposed to ridicule through exposing situations. This sent a moral message to the audience. Most genre images also have a didactic relevance because they have a strong moral content. The presentation of negative behaviors should discourage and encourage better behavior and positive examples should give the viewer an incentive to imitate. Of course, the images can not be denied the visually entertaining value. Because of the instructive-moralizing interpretive approaches inherent in the images, their owners were able to emphasize their cultural background. The commissioners for this kind of art therefore came exclusively from the bourgeois-secular milieu.
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Its rank in the hierarchy of genres is quite low, but it was brought to a point of perfection in the seventeenth century by Caravaggio and his followers. It is also a very popular genre in northern European countries. Genre painting was very popular from the second half of the nineteenth century to the 1930s, dethroning history painting. It was taught separately in the different academies of European fine arts.
Earlier research approaches often interpreted the representations of the so-called Gouden Eeuw as snapshots of everyday life, to which they attached the value of a cultural-historical testimony. Since the 1970s, however, it has increasingly been possible to decipher the iconographic context. It became clear that while the genre images exemplify an everyday scene, behind which is almost always hidden a deeper statement. Accordingly, they are in the sense of the popular visual language of the Baroque usually as allegories, partly with complex ambiguous statements, to understand.
Many alleged everyday scenes are based more on popular comic plays or proverbs and are therefore often – if not always – narrative in character. For example, an Italian genre painter, the Neapolitan Gaspare Traversi, created his pictures in parallel with the development and heyday of the opera buffa napolitana around the mid-18th century, when the everyday life of the lower social milieu was exposed to ridicule through exposing situations. This sent a moral message to the audience. Most genre images also have a didactic relevance because they have a strong moral content. The presentation of negative behaviors should discourage and encourage better behavior and positive examples should give the viewer an incentive to imitate. Of course, the images can not be denied the visually entertaining value. Because of the instructive-moralizing interpretive approaches inherent in the images, their owners were able to emphasize their cultural background. The commissioners for this kind of art therefore came exclusively from the bourgeois-secular milieu.
Traditionally, it has been called petit genre in opposition to the great genre that was history painting. The artistic representation of everyday issues is now very common, but it was unusual in the Renaissance and the Baroque, when it was assumed that art had an intellectual and creative content that should turn to cults and praise characters of category, of the classes high, or noble examples of the historical, religious or mythological past. For this reason, the painting of history was considered the superior genre and, on the other hand, representing peasants and other modest population without an argument or moral pretext was irreverent for the intellectual artists.
In classical Greece, tragedy was more valued, that is, the representation of a noble action executed by gods or heroes, than comedy, which was understood as the daily actions of vulgar people. In this sense, Aristotle, in his Poetics, ends up giving precedence to the poetic fiction, because it narrates what could happen, what is possible, credible or necessary, more than what actually happened, which would be the field of the historian. From the seventeenth century began to value more the representation of what classical art considered “comedy”: the everyday, the lesser stories of ordinary people. Not coincidentally, Hogarth’s representations of his contemporaries were called by this comic history painting (“comic story painting”).
The purpose of this type of painting, in any way, can raise doubts. It is not known with certainty if it is a simple representation of reality with a purpose of mere distraction, sometimes comical, or a moralizing purpose was sought through the examples close to the viewer. Baroque genre scenes, apparently everyday, can often hide allegorical themes. Thus, the scenes of groups of people having fun and drunken musicians allows the iconographic representation of the “five senses”. The hidden meaning of these scenes of daily life would thus instruct an attentive observer. So there are two ways of interpreting these pictures: either they are a cryptic iconography that conceals a didactic aspect, or it is a mere anecdote of genre for entertainment of the bourgeois public. There is no doubt that in the genre painting of the eighteenth century, the satirical or moralizing intention was present in works such as Hogarth or Greuze.
Although in the south of Europe gender painting was made from Caravaggio, the truth is that it was cultivated and appreciated mainly in the Nordic countries. The great comitentes (the nobility, the clergy) were not interested in this type of works, normally of small format, which had, on the other hand, a great fortune and diffusion among the bourgeoisie, the middle class and the merchants, due to their familiar theme and often sentimental. They were paintings that did not require a special effort when evaluating them, since there were no cryptic messages to unravel through symbols, as was often the case in the history painting. It is not by chance therefore that the first great painters of genre scenes emerged in the Netherlands, with a strong mercantile component.
The genre scene is a type of artistic work, mainly pictorial, in which normal people are represented in everyday scenes, on the street or in private life, contemporary with the author. What distinguishes the genre scene is that it represents scenes of everyday life, such as markets, interiors, parties, taverns and streets. Such representations can be realistic, imaginary or embellished by the artist. Some variations of the term “work” or “gender work” specify the medium or type of visual work as “genre painting”, “genre sheets” or “genre photographs”. In all these expressions the term “gender” is used in a somewhat forced translation of the English “genre”. In Spanish, the term painting costumbrista or customs painting has also been used.
History:
It can sometimes be considered that genre painting has existed since antiquity, even if it is religiously connoted. Some art historians consider Egyptian paintings of field work, banquets, feasts, and so on. like genre painting. Pliny the Elder quotes Peiraikos as a Hellenistic painter of “low” subjects, as they survive in mosaics and murals in Pompeii: “Shoemakers’ stalls, hairdressing salons, stalls, donkeys, food and the like”. in Greek or Etruscan vases one can sometimes find scenes of market or hunting that are similar to genre scenes, as some mosaics and Roman paintings.
With the Middle Ages, which essentially produces an art with a religious vocation, the genre scene is confined to the margins and the initials of the manuscripts. Medieval illuminated manuscripts often illustrate the scenes of everyday peasant life, especially in the Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry. It returns only timidly in certain frescoes of the trecento, as in the Allegories of good and bad government by Lorenzetti, but they remain attached to a moral or religious subject.
It is with Van Eyck and the Flemish primitives that the genre scene really seems to be reborn. The married Arnolfini, beyond the portrait, presents characters in a bourgeois interior, detached from the religious world, and can be considered as the first genre scene. Van Eyck’s other compositions, now lost, like a Lady at her toilet confirm this interpretation. It is interesting to note that it is in Flanders that this practice really begins: it is especially the schools of the North which will then put this genre in the spotlight.
The Renaissance:
With the decline of the involvement of religion in art, the genre scene begins to develop from the Renaissance, especially in Flanders. The Peseur d’Or and his wife Quentin Matsys is a perfect example, although as most of the time, it must be read symbolically. Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel the Elder will not hesitate to exploit the scenes of genre, to illustrate proverbs and stories (today often lost) which give a “secular” shade to the religious work.
In Italy as in France, this theme is much less well received, despite frequent women bathing in the school of Fontainebleau, but most often related to mythological painting or history painting, more than the genre scene itself.
18th century:
The Low Countries dominated the field until the 18th century, and in the 17th century both Flemish Baroque painting and Dutch Golden Age painting produced numerous specialists who mostly painted genre scenes. In the previous century, the Flemish Renaissance painter Jan 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” in Antwerp painting, giving “low” elements previously in the decorative background of images prominent emphasis. Joachim Patinir expanded his landscapes, making the figures a small element, and Pieter Aertsen painted works dominated by spreads of still 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 and Isaac van Ostade, Jan Steen, Adriaan Brouwer, David Teniers, Aelbert Cuyp, Johannes Vermeer and Pieter 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 popular emblem from an Emblem book. This can give the painting a double meaning, such as in Gabriel Metsu’s The Poultry seller, 1662, showing an old man offering a rooster in a symbolic pose that is based on a lewd engraving by Gillis van Breen (1595–1622), with the same scene. The merry 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.
In Italy, a “school” of genre painting was stimulated by the arrival in Rome of the Dutch painter Pieter van Laer in 1625. He acquired the nickname “Il Bamboccio” and his followers were called the Bamboccianti, whose works would inspire Giacomo Ceruti, Antonio Cifrondi, and Giuseppe 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 the romanticized paintings of Watteau and Fragonard, or the careful realism of Chardin. 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 ful of narrative detail (aided by long sub-titles), often in serial form, as in his A Rake’s Progress, first painted in 1732–33, then engraved and published in print form in 1735.
Spain had a tradition predating The Book of Good Love of social observation and commentary based on the Old Roman Latin tradition, practiced by many of its painters and illuminators. At the height of the Spanish Empire and the beginning of its slow decline, many picaresque genre scenes of street life—as well as the kitchen scenes known as bodegones—were painted by the artists of The Spanish Golden Age, notably Velázquez (1599–1660) and Murillo (1617–82). More than a century later, the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) used genre scenes in painting and printmaking as a medium for dark commentary on the human condition. His The Disasters of War, a series of 82 genre incidents from the Peninsular War, took genre art to unprecedented heights of expressiveness.
19th century:
In the nineteenth century, the expression “genre painting” replaced by abbreviation the expressions “vulgar genre painting”, “low genre”, “minor genre” which designated works representing scenes of everyday or intimate life, opposition to “historical genre paintings”. Scenes from the Bible could be taken for genre scenes by ignorance of the subject. Bamboos were called vulgar paintings of peasants or scenes of inns. In nineteenth-century Italy, the greatest exponents of genre painting are Antonio Rotta and Vincenzo Petrocelli.
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 as Gustave 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 the Troubador style. This trend, already apparent by 1817 when Ingres painted Henri IV Playing with His Children, culminated in the pompier art of French academicians such as Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Jean-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 include Augustus Leopold Egg, George Elgar Hicks, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. Scotland produced two influential genre painters, David Allan (1744–96) and Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841). Wilkie’s The Cottar’s Saturday Night (1837) inspired a major work by the French painter Gustave Courbet, After Dinner at Ornans (1849). Famous Russian realist painters like Vasily Perov and Ilya Repin also produced genre paintings.
In Germany, Carl Spitzweg (1808–85) specialized in gently humorous genre scenes, and in Italy Gerolamo Induno (1825–90) painted scenes of military life. Subsequently the Impressionists, as well as such 20th-century artists as Pierre Bonnard, Itshak Holtz, Edward Hopper, and David 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 immigrant John Lewis Krimmel, who learning from Wilkie and Hogarth, produced gently humorous scenes of life in Philadelphia from 1812–21. Other notable 19th-century genre painters from the United States include George Caleb Bingham, William Sidney Mount, and Eastman Johnson. Harry Roseland focused on scenes of poor African Americans in the post-American Civil War South, and John Rogers (1829–1904) was a sculptor whose small genre works, mass-produced in cast plaster, were immensely popular in America. The works of American painter Ernie Barnes (1938–2009) and those of illustrator Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) could exemplify a more modern type of genre painting.
Social Realism:
In the first half of the 19th century (Biedermeier), the genre image revives as a “social trend picture” again, especially by the Düsseldorf School of Painting, especially in connection with a stronger turn to realism, such as Johann Peter Hasenclever. After 1848 represented in Germany artists such as Ludwig Knaus, Benjamin Vautier or Franz von Defregger a genre painting, which was related to the literary current of the Civil Realism. The genre painting of those decades can be regarded as a pioneer of modern art movements such as Impressionism. A rapidly growing number of art-interested buyers, especially from middle-class households, fulfilled the desire for their own artwork on the wall. In particular, the peasant rural life, which has become fashionable in the course of the increasing travel activity, was presented in medium size formats in the USA as well. In art metropolises such as Berlin, Dusseldorf and Munich, large numbers of painters from all over Europe gathered to earn their living from genre painting. Among the best-known genre painters, whose works also found their way into monthly magazines, were representatives of the Munich School such as Franz Defregger, Rudolf Epp, Nikolaus Gysis, Hermann von Kaulbach.
20th century:
Subsequently, impressionists and artists of the twentieth century as Vincenzo Petrocelli, Pierre Bonnard, Edward Hopper or David Park painted scenes of daily life. However, in the context of modern art, the term “genre painting” has come to be related mainly to painting of a nature that is especially sentimental or anecdotal, painted in a traditionally realistic technique. The works of the American painter Ernie Barnes, and those of the illustrator Norman Rockwell can exemplify a modern type of genre painting.