activities such as the observation of scientific experiments. He painted contemporary, imaginative and
Shakespearean subjects that appealed to the educated classes. In Britain, Hogarth’s “modern moral
subjects” (discussed further in Chapter 5) straddled the allegorical complexities of history paintings and
the entertainment value of comic genre scenes (B. Gaehtgens, 2003, 48).
In a reversal of this history–genre conflation and toward the very end of the century, the art of history
painters such as David strove to incorporate some of the “honesty,” “truth to nature” and references to the
familiar or everyday for which domestic genre scenes had become well known. His classical history
painting, The Lictors returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons (Les Licteurs rapportent à Brutus les
corps de ses fils, 1789) (Figure 2.12) highlights the type of family drama imagined by Greuze (one of his
early teachers), as well as a still life detail of a sewing basket, rather than the classical hero Brutus,
shown brooding over his own responsibility for his sons’ executions as he had denounced them for their
part in a royalist conspiracy, during the first Roman republic. For David’s coteries this generic hybridity
constituted a means of undermining traditional oldregime power structures, hierarchies and styles of
composition in history painting (Crow, 1995, 102–109). Additionally, from the 1780s (and especially in
the 1790s) the Paris Salon was more open than before to significant numbers of artists from outside the
Académie royale, and this meant that larger numbers of genre paintings were displayed. A growing
preoccupation in art with contemporary manners and the interest in them shown by a broader public are
among the qualities that often lead to the view that eighteenthcentury genre paintings exerted a
modernizing influence (Conisbee, 2007, 10). Genre paintings also assigned a more prominent role to
women as artists, subjects and viewers (Conisbee, 2007, 29–32). Through their active involvement in the
semipublic world of the Paris salons, as well as in their visits to Salon exhibitions, women became
increasingly accustomed both to viewing others and to being viewed by them: social interactions of this
kind facilitated a more active role for women in visual culture.