the sitters involved to assert that they belonged to a particular class and its achievements. Female sitters
in these works often addressed the viewer through a direct outward gaze, akin to a theatrical aside,
explicitly inviting or mediating engagement in the construction of a painting’s meanings in such a way as
to draw attention to the act of looking itself. These figures were constructed as both viewers (of the
imagined actual viewer) and as objects of the viewer’s gaze. Such a device ran the risk of associating the
women concerned with the behaviors of acting or artifice, but it was commonly used (see Figure 2.10).
The hierarchical classificatory system shifted to accommodate other genres that sat “in between” official
categories. As emotional expressiveness became fashionable, so did works known as “expressive heads”
(Kayser, 2003, 118). These were general representations of emotions (such as “Fear” or “Innocence”) in
portrait formats, but not based (or only very loosely so) on specific individuals. They drew on stock types
such as the “pupil” or the “letter writer.” The late work of Greuze included many such paintings, which
appropriated some of the moral import and emotional rhetoric of history painting. This type of painting,
which combined a portrait format with allusions to everyday life and a high expressive key, lay
somewhere at the intersection of portraiture, history and genre.
The “fantasy figure,” which drew on the tradition of the “expressive head,” was another kind of work that
adopted portrait formats in order to create imaginative subjects with little or no connection to identifiable
sitters but presented as types such as the “cavalier” or the “artist.” Fragonard was something of a
trendsetter in this respect. His work evaded the legible moral codes and lessons typical of history
painting, especially when he later worked independently of the Académie royale and achieved
commercial success. This is evident in the free, expressive brushwork in which he executed these works
(Percival, 2012, 38, 50). The very term “fantasy” was associated with rulebreaking and spontaneous
modes of creativity (Percival, 2012, 12), although Fragonard drew on many precedents from earlier art;
for example, Italian, Dutch and Flemish works of the seventeenth century and Renaissance such as those
by Rembrandt, Frans Hals (1582/3–1666),Titian and Caravaggio (Percival, 2012, 51–63), as well as on
many more recent French and British works by Watteau, Boucher, Greuze, Reynolds, Gainsborough and
Wright of Derby. The ambiguous nature of Fragonard’s fantasy figures, and their emphasis on activities
(e.g. writing, reading, painting) has in the past led to their classification as genre paintings. However, they
seem to enter more comfortably into the wide range of subgenres in play in the eighteenth century before
the term “genre painting” was in common use. British versions of the fantasy figure appeared more rooted
in everyday life (Percival, 2012, 71). In general, the subjects and meanings of fantasy figures were
unclear, even when sitters were named in titles. In Fragonard’s fantasy figures, costumes (often overtly in
the tradition of “dressing up” or masquerade), identities and expressions were ambiguous in a way that
was deliberately intended to stimulate the viewer’s imagination and to evoke alternative, transgressive
and escapist identities and lifestyles, in a way that we would now consider to be “modern” (Barker,
2009, 309–310; Percival, 2012, 122, 133).
Generic fluidity worked very much in favor of the “lower” genres, which gained in stature. In the case of
landscape painting, there was a recognition that the genre could engage the imagination in a way that
reduced its distance from history painting. There was also an increasing acknowledgment of the fact that a
wellpainted landscape, however closely based on reality, was better than a badly conceived or
executed history painting. Reynolds revealed, in his Discourses, a brave departure in this respect:
I am well aware how much I lay myself open to the censure and ridicule of the academical professors
of other nations, in preferring the humble attempts of Gainsborough to the works of those regular
graduates in the great historical style. But we have the sanction of all mankind in preferring genius in a
lower rank of art, to feebleness and insipidity in the highest.
(Reynolds, 1975 [1797], 249)