Article: What a Genre Scene Was Really Saying
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What a Genre Scene Was Really Saying
A genre scene is a painting of ordinary life, and for most of its history it was never only that. Before the nineteenth century the everyday was a vehicle. Then, quite quickly, the meaning fell away and painters began showing ordinary life because it was ordinary life. Learning to see that shift is most of what there is to know about the genre.
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| What a genre scene is not | ||
| Not a portrait | Not a history painting | Not a landscape |
| Nobody is named and nobody is posing. | The event is not from scripture or antiquity. | The figures are the subject, not the measure of the land. |
| A sitter is presented to you. A genre figure is caught doing something, and is looking at it rather than at you. | ||
The setting usually carries the label. An interior genre painting shows a room and the life inside it, a kitchen, a workshop, a tavern. An outdoor scene shows a market, a garden, a village street. Dutch genre painting of the seventeenth century is built almost entirely on interiors, while the French tradition moved outdoors earlier and stayed there. The distinction matters when you are buying, because the same canvas will be described differently depending on who is selling it. A woman in a garden is a portrait if the seller thinks she was somebody, and a genre scene if he does not.
Four places to look
How to Read an Early Genre Painting |
Before roughly 1800, assume the picture is telling you something and that you are expected to work it out. A fortune being told was a warning about credulity. A peasant at a fire was the month of January, one panel out of four.
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| The corners | The meaning is almost never in the middle. A painter who wanted to moralise put the moral where the eye arrives last, behind a shoulder or under a table. If a figure at the edge is doing something the central figure has not noticed, that figure is the subject. | |
| The hands | What is held, offered, hidden or reached for carries more than any expression. A hand that has left the picture, or one that rests where it should not, is deliberate. | |
| The objects | Early genre painting used a vocabulary its first audience read without effort and that we have largely lost. Flowers, mirrors, coins, playing cards, instruments, animals and food all carried settled meanings. A rose held out across a garden was a proposal. You only need to notice that an object has been placed rather than merely included. | |
| The season | A bare tree, a lit fire, a scythe, a full basket. Cycles of the year and of human life were among the commonest structures in genre painting, and a single canvas is often one month or one age out of a set that has been broken up. |
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| The eye goes to the silk and the raised hand. | The subject is in the lower left corner, where it arrives last. |
Across the nineteenth century
When the Meaning Fell Away |
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| Before 1800 | After 1850 |
| Something is being said | Something is being seen |
| The scene needs an event. A transaction, a deception, a feast. Painted indoors, from a plan, with the moral placed where the eye arrives last. | The scene needs almost nothing. A lady reading, a woman knitting, a family under trees. Painted outdoors, quickly, from what was in front of the painter. |
| A woman knitting under a tree holds the eye longer than a woman being robbed. There is nothing to solve, and therefore nothing to finish. | |
The reasons were partly practical. The painters were working outdoors, quickly, from what was in front of them, and a moral takes planning. They were also selling to a new kind of buyer, one who wanted a picture for a room rather than an argument for a wall. The shift is not a decline. It is the moment when the genre stopped being a delivery system and became a subject.
Four centuries, in our own pictures
The Shift, in Four Paintings |
When the picture meant something
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French School, Allegory of Winter17th century · Oil on wood panel · 23 x 18 in, framed 30 x 25 inThe panel is divided. An interior on the left, the oldest kind, a single figure and a fire. The whole village at work on the right, in a bare landscape, one figure slipping on the frozen path. Every element belongs to winter, and the panel almost certainly had three companions. |
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French School, The Fortune Teller18th century · Oil on canvas · 29 x 25 in, unframedA young woman in cream silk sits while an older woman reads her hand. The subject is not the reading. It is the boy at the lower left, half hidden, lifting the purse from her side while she is distracted, one finger raised to his lips. The picture is a warning, and it hides it where the eye arrives last. |
When it stopped meaning anything
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Octave Guenard, Woman in a Park19th century · Signed oil on canvas · 11 x 16 in, framed 15 x 21 inA woman in black, in a pale straw hat, sits in the grass and knits. A ball of red wool is the only strong colour in the canvas. Her umbrella lies closed beside her, which tells you she has been there a while. Two centuries earlier the red would have meant something. Here it is wool, and the picture is about an afternoon. |
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Henri Stenn, The Luxembourg Garden20th century · Signed oil on canvas · 15 x 18 in, framed 20½ x 23½ inMothers and children under the trees, a pram at the centre, a boy in shorts leaning against a chair with his back to us. The light comes through the leaves in patches and nothing is arranged. Look for the moral and there is none. The painting exists because a Thursday afternoon in a Paris garden was worth putting on canvas. |
Three rules
Buying an Antique Genre Painting |
Date the picture before you interpret it. A detail that would be a symbol in 1650 is usually just a detail in 1890. Reading meaning into a late genre scene is the commonest mistake made about them.
Look for the missing companions. Seasons, months, ages of man, times of day. If the subject belongs to a cycle, the panel you are looking at was probably one of four, and the others may still exist. This is worth asking a seller about.
Anonymous is not a defect here. Genre scenes were rarely signed before the nineteenth century, and the best of them are often by painters whose names are lost. You are buying the picture, not the label.
In public collections
Where to See Them |
The Le Nain brothers, Peasant Family in an Interior, about 1642. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Jean Siméon Chardin, The Return from Market, 1739. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller, about 1595. Musée du Louvre, the source of every fortune telling scene painted afterwards.
Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, about 1658. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Jan Steen, The Merry Family, 1668. Rijksmuseum, a moral delivered as a joke.
Sources. Musée du Louvre, Paris, and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
