Genre Painting

I

Introduction

Genre Painting, type of painting concerned with the realistic depiction of scenes from everyday life. Genre paintings deal with ordinary life, including family life, sports, street scenes, picnics, festivals, and tavern scenes. They are usually characterized by human interest and by the care and finish with which they are executed.

II

Early Genre Painting

Genre painting originated in ancient times. Many of the scenes painted on the walls of Egyptian tombs represent the daily life of the people of ancient Egypt. Excavations in the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum have revealed many genre paintings, some having an erotic theme. In the late Middle Ages genre painting reappeared, represented chiefly in the religious calendars that formed part of the illustrations in illuminated manuscripts; the calendars show people going about the occupations appropriate to each season of the year.

In Italy during the early Renaissance, many of the religious and historical pictures of such painters as the 15th-century Florentines Ghirlandaio and Benozzo Gozzoli and the later Venetians Giorgione and the Bassano family are considered genre paintings because of their contemporaneous backgrounds and costumes as well as their use of people of the times as models.

In the 15th century the Flemish painter Petrus Christus represented scenes from ordinary life in some of his religious paintings, and in the following two centuries genre painting matured, reaching its apotheosis in the work of the Flemish artists Pieter Brueghel the Elder, David Teniers, and Adriaen Brouwer.

III

Dutch Genre Painting

The most illustrious national school of genre painting was that of the Netherlands in the 17th century. Probably never before or since was the ordinary life of a nation depicted so fully as was the Dutch life of this period. Not only the great masters but also the less outstanding Dutch painters excelled at it. The most important of the Dutch genre painters were the so-called little masters, including Gerard Ter Borch, Jan Steen, Gabriel Metsu, Pieter de Hooch, Gerrit Dou, and Adriaen van Ostade. The three leading 17th-century Dutch masters, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Jan Vermeer, also created genre paintings of unrivalled beauty.

IV

Later Genre Painting

French genre painting showed a vital development in the work of Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. One of the most noted English genre painters was the great satirist William Hogarth.

In the 19th century, genre painting was widely practised in both Europe and the United States. Among the outstanding European painters in this style were the French painters Jean Léon Gérôme and Jean Meissonier, the English painter William Powell Frith, and the American painter William Sidney Mount, known as the “Jan Steen of Long Island”. Among the many 19th- and 20th-century American painters whose work included genre painting were Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Wesley Bellows, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton. Prominent British genre painters working in the early decades of the 20th century include Walter Sickert, Augustus John, and Dame Laura Knight.