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 themes appear in nearly all art traditions. 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
Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.
To 1800 '', by Dirck Hals 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,
Adriaen 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. ,
Filial Piety, 1765 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 full 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 ,
The Hunters at Rest (1871) '', Charles E. Weir, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1842 ,
Country Wedding (1820) 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,
Frederick Daniel Hardy,
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
Pavel Fedotov,
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 to 1821. 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.
Genre in other traditions Japanese
ukiyo-e prints are rich in depictions of people at leisure and at work, as are
Korean paintings, particularly those created in the 18th century.
Gallery of Flemish genre paintings File:Jan Sanders van Hemessen 002.jpg|
Jan Sanders van Hemessen,
Brothel scene, . File:David Teniers (II) - Tavern Scene - WGA22082.jpg|
David Teniers the Younger,
Tavern scene, 1640. File:Joos van Craesbeeck - Soldiers and Women.jpg|
Joos van Craesbeeck,
Soldiers and Women, 1640s
Gallery of Dutch 17th-century genre paintings File:Hendrick_Avercamp_-_Winterlandschap_met_ijsvermaak.jpg|
Hendrick Avercamp painted almost exclusively winter scenes of crowds. File:Gerard van Honthorst - Der liederliche Student - 391 - Bavarian State Painting Collections.jpg|
Gerard van Honthorst,
Merry Company, 1623, with the
chiaroscuro composition often used by the
Utrecht Caravaggists. File:Judith Leyster A Boy and a Girl with a Cat and an Eel.jpg|
Judith Leyster,
A Boy and a Girl with a Cat and an Eel, ==Genre photography==