Antique Genre Scene Paintings

About this collection

An antique genre painting shows people who are nobody in particular, doing something anybody might do, and for most of its history the everyday was a vehicle for something else. A fortune being told was a warning, a season was a calendar, a rose offered across a garden was a proposal.

The tradition covers the whole range of ordinary life, from the interior to the garden, from the tavern and the market to the hunt and the harvest, and it carried allegory and mythology alongside observation for as long as painters expected to be read.

For guidance on reading the subject, see our guide to what a genre scene was really saying.

A Concert of Putti in a Landscape, Oil on Panel, Flemish School 17th Century, Period Gilded Frame

17th century

$4,800

Italian School, 18th Century, Nymph and Satyr, Oil on Canvas, Framed

18th century

$2,900

French School, 17th Century, Allegory of Winter, Oil on Wood Panel, Framed

17th century

$4,300

Antique French oil on wood panel, a gallant scene with Cupid in a formal garden, in moulded frame

17th Century French Oil on Panel, Gallant Scene in a Garden, Old Master Baroque Original, Framed

17th century

$4,800

Seventeenth century French allegory of autumn, a young woman with fruit beneath a tree in a harvest landscape, oil on panel in its original painted frame

French School, Allegory of Autumn, Oil on Wood Panel, 17th Century, in its Painted Frame

17th century

$3,920

Octave Guenard (1845-1934), Woman in a Park, Signed Oil on Canvas, 19th Century, Framed

19th century

$2,700

A young woman in a pink silk gown reaching to a rose on a garden terrace, a servant with a basket of flowers at the right and a spaniel at her feet, in a carved gilt frame

Louis Lassalle, Young Woman Gathering Roses in a Garden, Signed Oil on Canvas, Carved Rococo Revival Frame

19th century

$5,785

The Fortune Teller and the Stolen Purse, French Genre Scene, Oil on Canvas, 18th Century, Unframed

18th century

$5,785

Antique genre scene paintings for sale here span the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, covering the interior and the garden, figures at work and at rest, and the allegorical subjects that stood beside them, several signed by listed painters and presented in period frames. Collectors searching for a 19th century genre scene, an antique interior scene painting, a french antique genre scene, or an old master figure subject for a dining room wall will find the tradition here in its French and Flemish forms.

Free shipping to the USA and Canada. For the wider series on judging and collecting, see our How to Collect Antique Paintings guide.

Antique Genre Scene Paintings

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