coincided with a growing interest in genre paintings; that is, paintings of figures often (but not
exclusively) from more modest social backgrounds engaged in everyday activities or recognizable
narrative events. The term “subject painting” is normally applied to later, nineteenthcentury examples of
the type. While such subjects continued to be regarded as inferior to history paintings, since they did not
represent actions of an exceptional, heroic or epic nature, they gained considerably in status with critics
and public alike as the eighteenth century progressed, largely as a consequence of the increasing amount
of attention attracted by their display in public and academic exhibitions, the vibrancy of the market in
genre prints and the opening up of the art market to those whose interests and tastes extended beyond those
of social elites (Schroder, 1997; Conisbee, 2007, 11, 32; Chapter 3). This fashion for paintings of more
modest lifestyles has also been interpreted as arising from the vogue among collectors, from the late
seventeenth century onwards, for naturalistic Dutch portraits and domestic scenes of the “middling” and
servant classes represented in plainer settings and engaged in relatively humble (but usually harmless or
implicitly virtuous) activities (Dejean, 2007, 39–47; Bailey, 2003, 2, 18–21). It has also been seen as
signifying a growing opposition to more decadent aristocratic values. Aristocratic buyers themselves
might purchase and display such paintings as a means of neutralizing or distancing themselves from the
more corrupt moral values often associated with their class, particularly in France where there was a
backlash, in the second half of the century, against luxury and its association with selfish hedonism (see
Chapter 5). For city dwellers owning country estates, scenes of virtuous peasant life might also help to
perpetuate a fiction of happy rusticity preferable to accounts of actual rural poverty (T.W. Gaehtgens,
2003, 88).
The formal establishment of the genre was not straightforward. Christian Michel (2007, 277) has pointed
out that the term “genre painting” as we now use it was a lateeighteenthcentury invention and when
used during most of the eighteenth century was applied to a whole range of subjects, from still life to
domestic family scenes, or in fact anything that fell outside the history genre, that prioritized naturalism
over idealization or the grand manner (see also Wrigley, 1993, 293; Bailey, 2003, 3–5). Only three artists
(including Greuze) were admitted to the eighteenthcentury Académie royale specifically as genre
painters, the only types of figural painting normally recognized at the time being history and portraiture
(Bailey, 2003, 2). Artists painting genre subjects were described in a range of ways, such as “painter with
a particular talent for animals and fruit” (with reference to Chardin); “painter in the genre of figures in
modern dress” (with reference to Antoine de Favray, 1706–1798); “painter in the genre of scenes from
common life” (with reference to Johann Georg Wille 1715–1808); or “painter of bambochades” (defined
in 1752 as “paintings of gallant or country scenes, fairs, smoke dens and other cheerful subjects”; Bailey,
2003, 2) with reference to Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743). Genre paintings were known by a host of terms,
many of which originated in northern Europe or Italy, including “scenes in the Flemish taste,” “kitchen
scenes,” “beautiful scenes from civil life,” “familiar scenes,” “scenes from private life,” “domestic
scenes,” “peasant scenes,” “grotesque” subjects (which introduced an element of ugliness, disorder or
horror), “peasant weddings,” “guardroom scenes” (“corps de garde”), scenes from fashionable society
(most evident in the French tradition of tableaux de mode), sporting, racing and hunting scenes (popular
with the British landowning gentry; Blake, 2004, 43–63) and, in France, fêtes galantes (Watteau’s
invented genre of the early century showing the aristocracy at play) (Wrigley, 1993, 292). Many paintings
of contemporary life, such as those by Hogarth or Gaspare Traversi (1722–1770), had a satirical function
and conveyed an underlying moral message: this will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. Hogarth
and Hayman were specialists in the subgenre of paintings of theatrical performances (Allen, 1987, 11–
23).
Our modern usage of the term “genre painting” tends to be applied most frequently to domestic or family
scenes conveying social and moral values such as those implicit in the works of Chardin, Greuze and their