Figure 2.12 JacquesLouis David: The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons, oil on canvas,
323 × 422 cm, 1789, Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Source: E. Lessing/De Agostini/Getty Images.Mid to lateeighteenthcentury French genre paintings were “modern” in their sustained attention to
the daily lives of the expanding bourgeoisie or “middling” ranks of society. Smallscale Dutch paintings
of this nature had been common in the previous century, and popular in France, but at that time prominent
French artists had focused on largerscale works on the “simple” or peasant life, or fashionable
narrative scenes, such as those produced by the brothers Antoine (c.1599–1648), Louis (c.1603–1648)
and Mathieu (c.1607–1677) Le Nain, all of whom had become members of the Académie royale (Mérot,
1995, 157–179). Tableaux de mode or French paintings of fashionable society, popular in the 1720s and
1730s, focused on the lifestyles of the higher classes (Ebeling, 2007, 73–89). These paintings, by de Troy,
Lancret and others, represented royalty, aristocrats and wouldbe aristocrats such as wealthy financiers
in their leisure hours – hunting, making music, dining, drinking chocolate. These groups were united by
their taste for luxury and were distinguished by their dress (e.g. redheeled shoes, worn only by those
who had attended court) and the presence of their liveried servants. Reenacting seventeenthcentury
codes of gentility or honnêteté, these classes often viewed tableaux de mode as a means of validating
their wealth and status or of identifying similarities, differences and tensions in class allegiances (Bailey,
2003, 24). To the art critic LouisGuillaume Baillet de SaintJulien (1726?–1795) the propensity of