Genre painting, painting of scenes from everyday life, of ordinary people in work or recreation, depicted in a generally realistic manner. Genre art contrasts with that of landscape, portraiture, still life, religious themes, historic events, or any kind of traditionally idealized subject matter.
Intimate scenes from daily life are almost invariably the subject of genre painting. The elimination of imaginative content and of idealization focuses attention upon the shrewd observation of types, costumes and settings.
The term arose in 18th-century France to describe painters specializing in one kind genre of picture, such as flowers or animals or middle-class life, and was originally used derogatively by advocates of the ideal or grand manner in art.
Winslow Homer | A Temperance Meeting (or Noon Time) 1876
At the Café Concert - Edgar Degas 1834-1917
Rose and Amélie 1894, Edvard Munch
Wilhelm August Lebrecht Amberg 1822-1899
‣ The Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder made peasants and their activities 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, David Teniers, Aelbert Cuyp, Johannes Vermeer and Pieter De Hooch were among the many painters specializing in genre subjects in the Netherlands 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.
‣ 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, 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.
Johannes Vermeer 1632-1675 - Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
Johannes Vermeer 1632-1675 - Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
‣ In England, William Hogarth conveyed social criticism and moral lessons through canvases that told stories of ordinary people, often in serial form.
William Powell Frith is perhaps the most famous English genre painter and was admired by many of his contemporaries.
William Powell Frith is perhaps the most famous English genre painter and was admired by many of his contemporaries.
Other English genre painters include: Augustus Leopold Egg, George Elgar Hicks, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
‣ Scotland produced two influential genre painters, David Allan 1744-96 and Sir David Wilkie 1785-1841.
Gustave Courbet 1819-77 one of France's most famous genre painters, based his celebrated painting 'After Dinner at Ornans' 1849 on Wilkie's 'The Cottar's Saturday Night' 1837.
‣ Famous Russian realist painters like Vasily Perov and Ilya Repin 1844-1930 also tried out in the genre paintings.
Gustave Courbet 1819-77 one of France's most famous genre painters, based his celebrated painting 'After Dinner at Ornans' 1849 on Wilkie's 'The Cottar's Saturday Night' 1837.
‣ Famous Russian realist painters like Vasily Perov and Ilya Repin 1844-1930 also tried out in the genre paintings.
Rembrandt van Rijn - The Anatomy Lesson
‣ Spain had an old tradition standing since before The Book of Good Love of social observation and commentary based on the Old Roman Latin tradition and to this many of its painters,and illuminated miniature painters followed work.
Pedro Berruguete brought his social scenes and critic with many of its works.
What at the height of the Spanish Empire was continued including scenes of street life picaresque and at its slow falling eventually produced many works by the painters of The Spanish Golden Age, Velázquez, Murillo and others. The Spanish artist Francisco De Goya used genre painting as a medium for dark commentary on the human condition.
‣ The first true genre painter in the United States was German immigrant John Lewis Krimmel, who learning from Wilkie and Hogarth, produced gently humorous scenes of life in Philadelphia from 1812-21.
One of the more notable genre painters from the United States was Harry Roseland, who focused on scenes of poor African Americans in the post-American Civil War South.
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 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.
Subsequently the Impressionists*, as well as such 20th century artists as Pierre Bonnard, 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 works of American painter Ernie Barnes and those of illustrator Norman Rockwell could exemplify a more modern type of genre painting.
At the Moulin Rouge, The Dance - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
La pittura di genere, che si traduce nella pratica delle scene di genere, è una rappresentazione pittorica che ha per soggetto scene ed eventi tratti dalla vita quotidiana: ad esempio mercati, faccende domestiche, interni o feste.
La pittura di genere, rappresentando aspetti della vita di tutti i giorni, fu a lungo considerata un genere "minore", decisamente inferiore per valore alla pittura storico-religiosa, ma nemmeno al pari della ritrattistica. I grandi committenti non erano interessati a questo tipo di opere, solitamente di piccolo formato, che ebbero, invece, una notevole fortuna e diffusione tra la borghesia e i mercanti.
Non a caso, infatti, i primi grandi pittori di scene di genere si affermarono nei Paesi Bassi, paese con una forte componente mercantile: Pieter Brueghel il Vecchio, Adriaen e Isaac van Ostade, David Teniers il Giovane, Aelbert Cuyp, Johannes Vermeer e Pieter De Hooch sono tra i più noti pittori olandesi specializzati nelle scene di genere.
In Italia tra i primi pittori ad aver dipinto scene di genere si segnalano il cremonese Vincenzo Campi e il bolognese Bartolomeo Passerotti. Entrambi, e il secondo in specie, furono d'esempio per Annibale Carracci, il cui Mangiafagioli è uno dei dipinti di genere più celebri della pittura italiana.
Si distinsero inoltre nel Settecento i veneti Gabriele Bella e Pietro Longhi, e nell'Ottocento il goriziano Antonio Rotta e Vincenzo Petrocelli.
List of Genre Artists
- Jack Vettriano, 1951 | Realist / Figurative / Genre painter
- Ivana Kobilca (1870-1900) | Realist / Genre painter
- Eugène Buland | Genre | Naturalist painter
- Fernand Pelez | Genre / Academic painter
- Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-1884) | Genre painter
- Frans Wilhelm Odelmark | Genre / Orientalist painter
- Ignacio Zuloaga | Genre painter
- José Cruz Herrera (Spanish, 1890-1972) | Genre painter
- Alexandre-Auguste Hirsch | Genre painter
- James Tissot | Genre painter
- Yuri Klapouh, 1963 | Genre painter
- Giancarlo Vitali | Expressionist / Genre painter
- Angelo Batti, 1933 | Genre painter
- Nello Iovine, 1935 | Genre painter
- Alberto Pisa (1864-1930) | Genre painter
- François-Alfred Delobbe | Genre painter
- Eugene de Blaas | Academic /Genre painter
- Jafar Petgar (1920-2005) | Genre painter
- Thomas Benjamin Kennington | Victorian / Genre painter
- Luigi da Rios | Genre painter
- Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta | Genre painter
- Nikolaos Gyzis / Νικόλαος Γύζης | Genre painter
- Vincenzo Migliaro | Genre painter
- Vincenzo Migliaro | Genre painter ⁽²⁾
- Giovanni (Nino) Costa | Genre painter
- John Sloan | Genre painter | Ashcan School of Art
- Jean Beauduin | Genre painter
- John Frederick Lewis RA | Orientalist / Genre painter
- John Arthur Lomax | Genre painter
- Egisto Lancerotto | Genre painter
- John Frederick Lewis | Victorian / Orientalist / Genre painter
- Edward Portielje | Genre painter
- Laurits Andersen Ring | Symbolist / Genre painter
- Raffaello Sorbi | Genre painter
- Anton Mauve | Romantic / Genre painter | The Barbizon school of painters
- Paul Falconer Poole RA | Genre painter
- Vilhelm Hammershøi | Interior / Genre painter
- Vilhelm Hammershøi | Interior / Genre / Romantic painter
- Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret | Naturalist / Genre painter
- Albert Edelfelt | Academic / Genre painter
- Leopold Franz Kowalski | Genre painter
- Arthur Drummond | Classicist / Genre painter
- Vittorio Reggianini | Genre painter
- Arthur Drummond | Classicist / Genre painter
- Vittorio Reggianini | Genre painter
- George Henry Boughton RA | Genre painter
- Petrus van Schendel | Genre / Romantic painter
- Luigi Monteverde | Genre painter
- Meyer von Bremen | Genre painter | Düsseldorf school of painting
- Frederik Hendrik Kaemmerer | Genre / Impressionist painter
- Juan Gonzalez Alacreu, 1937 | Impressionist /Genre painter
- Wladyslaw Czachórski | Academic / Genre painter
- Léon Perrault | Genre / Academic painter
- Arthur John Elsley | Genre painter
- Frederick Morgan | Genre painter
- Peder Mork Mønsted | Plein air / Genre painter | Part. 2
- Peder Mork Mønsted | Plein air / Genre painter | Part. 3
- Peder Mork Mønsted | Plein air / Genre painter | Part. 4
- Peder Mork Mønsted | Plein air / Genre painter | Part. 5
- Paul Henry R.H.A. | Post-Impressionist Landscape / Genre painter
- Ivan Pili, 1976 | Hyperrealist / Genre painter
- Carlo Wostry | Genre / La Belle Époque painter
- Cesare Augusto Detti | Genre painter
- Gaetano Bellei | Academic genre painter
- Apostolos Geralis / Απόστολος Γεραλής | Academic Genre painter
- Lionello Balestrieri | Genre / Figurative / Impressionist painter
- Luca Postiglione | Genre /Portrait painter
- Salvatore Postiglione | Genre /Portrait painter
- Victor Gilbert | The Flower Seller | Academic /Genre painter
- Stanhope Forbes | Plein Air /Genre painter
- Benito Quinquela Martín | Seascape /Genre painter
- Eugenio Lucas Villaamil | Genre painter
- Édouard Bisson | Academic /Genre painter
- Filippo Palizzi | Figure / Genre / Barbizon landscape painter
- Vida Gábor | Genre painter
- Edward Lamson Henry | Genre painter
- Hugo Mühlig ~ Landscape / Genre painter | The Munich Secession
- Mathurin Janssaud | Genre painter
- Max Buri ~ Portrait/Genre painter
- Giovanni Panza | Impressionist /Genre painter
- Sir George Clausen RA | Victorian/ Edwardian/Genre painter
- Ettore Forti | Genre painter
- Ettore Tito | Genre/Symbolist/Modern painter
- Ralph Curtis | Figure-portrait/Genre painter
- John Frederick Lewis | Orientalist / Genre painter
- Attilio Pratella | Landscape/Genre painter
- Mosè Bianchi | Genre/Macchiaioli painter
- Emma Ekwall | Genre/Portrait painter
- José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior | Realist Genre painter
- Abram Efimovich Arkhipov | Genre/En plein air painter
- Virgilio Tojetti | Genre painter
- Nikolay Petrovich Bogdanov-Belsky ~ Genre academic painter
- Samuel Uhrdin | Genre painter
- Bruno Lucchesi, 1926 ~ Genre/Figurative sculptor
- Francesco Vinea ~ Genre painter
- Alessandro Zezzos | Genre painter
- Dyalma Stultus ~ Genre/Figurative painter
- George Dunlop Leslie ~ Genre painter
- Thomas Edwin Mostyn ~ Landscape/Genre painter
- Daniel Ridgway Knight ~ Genre/Figurative painter
- Henry Herbert La Thangue | Genre painter
- Franz Guillery | Genre painter
- Giacomo Favretto | Genre painter
- Vincenzo Irolli | Genre painter
- Antonio Ermolao Paoletti | Venetian genre scenes
- Nicolae Vermont | Genre /Post-Impressionism /Realist painter
- Théodore Gérard | Genre painter
- Jack Vettriano, 1951 | Realist / Figurative / Genre painter | Part. 2
- Federico Andreotti | Genre painter
- Fernando Amorsolo ~ Genre and Historical painter
- Charles Hawthorne ~ Portrait and Genre painter
- Leopold Schmutzler ~ Genre/Figurative painter
- Stanislav Sidorov, 1954 ~ Genre painter
- Guy Cambier ~ Genre painter
- Genre painting | Scenes from everyday life
- Ignacio Zuloaga | Genre /Realist painter
- Elio Ferrara, 1945 | Genre painter
- Georgios Iakovidis | Genre/Portrait painter
- James Sant RA | Portrait /Genre painter
- Ilya Repin ~ Historical/Genre painter