fashioning and display in a way that reassured them they still had the ability to win power over others, if
only through love (Plax, 2000, 113). This play on roles and identities and the general ambiguities of
action in Watteau’s paintings (e.g. their lack of narrative or expressive unity) worked against the legibility
of meaning necessary to the traditional functions of history painting (Crow, 1985, 63). However, his
works included jokes and witticisms that could be detected by those in the know; their meanings opaque
as befitted a culture that relished the improvised identities of the masquerade (Plax, 2007, 49–69).
This elusiveness suited an age in which the powers and social mores of royalty, aristocracy and newer,
emerging classes were in a state of flux. New ideologies formed as older ones dissolved, creating the
perfect conditions for innovation, not just in society but also in art. Watteau’s visual innovations drew on
the traditional type of the courtly landscape idyll, as expressed in earlier works by Rubens, Veronese and
Antonio da Correggio (active 1494; d.1534). Like Boucher’s idylls, they attempted to balance antiquity
(specifically, its pastoral fictions) with “nature,” their landscape settings serving as a backdrop for the
exploration of transgressive personal relationships. Some of his followers (e.g.de Troy) fused the fête
galante with bourgeois genre scenes, their figures dressed in everyday fashions and their erotic
suggestiveness minimalized, thus “normalizing” the signifying mechanisms of the genre (Conisbee, 1981,
156). Watteau’s fêtes galantes declined in popularity from the midcentury, when critics such as Anne
ClaudePhilippe de TubièresGrimoard de Pestels Levieux de Lévis, Comte de Caylus (1692–1765)
fought for a return to classical values and argued that Watteau’s works simply fell short of the narrative
power, expressive intensity and range of history paintings (B. Gaehtgens, 2003, 50).
The chronicling of “everyday manners” of a range of social and national groups was a traditional function
of genre painting that remained important, however, in the eighteenth century. Such paintings might have a
documentary function, constructing a visual record of the ways people lived. In Scotland the paintings of
David Allan (1744–1796) created a record of the games, dances, folk cultures and costumes of a number
of nations including those of his native country. Sophisticated buyers provided a market for scenes of such
“unspoiled” life (Macmillan, 1986, 65–70). The paintings of Pietro Longhi (1701–1785) of the haunts,
lives and foibles of Venetian peasants and nobles found an enthusiastic market, his works often made in a
satiric or comic vein similar to that of Hogarth. Scenes of rural life painted by George Morland (1763–
1804), an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy, became more popular internationally as the century
progressed and as an ideology of naturalness and simplicity took hold. These included representations of
everyday activities and narratives, often based on British farm life. Morland’s paintings tackled some of
the moral themes (e.g. industry and idleness) represented in Hogarth’s works, and included
representations of the less conventional lives of marginal groups such as gypsies and pedlars. The rural
subjects, animal and sporting subjects tackled by George Stubbs (1724–1806) were normally undertaken
as private aristocratic commissions, as the activities represented (hunting, racing) related more to the
landed gentry, but his works reached a wider audience in the later eighteenth century through the print
market.
By contrast with tableaux de mode and fêtes galantes, or perhaps Stubbs’ racing scenes, many genre
paintings from later in the century are considered to demonstrate social and moral standards around which
many groups (including the bourgeoisie and aristocracy) sought to coalesce, outside the frameworks of
traditional social hierarchies. In some respects this has been read as a debasement of the genre, reduced
in the work of artists such as Boilly to scenes dominated by a concern for fashion and anecdote: Diderot
called for reform of the genre (Bailey, 2003, 32). However, there were attempts to redress such trends.
Although the taste for tableaux de mode spread slightly “downwards” through the social scale, extending
to others seeking the wealth, status, tastes and values of a landed aristocracy, there was also among many
art buyers and collectors later in the century a desire that genre paintings should symbolize a new social
order based on political, social and moral reform. Genre painting met the interests of participants in an