Genre painting

Genre painting is the depiction of scenes from the everyday life of ordinary people: domestic occupations, household chores, festivities, markets, taverns, games, work and leisure. Such works are mostly small in scale and lack heroic, religious or historical elevation; their subjects are usually anonymous members of various social classes. In the traditional hierarchy of genres codified by the academies of the seventeenth century, genre painting occupied a modest place — above still life and landscape but below portraiture and history painting. The flowering of genre painting is associated above all with the golden age of seventeenth-century Dutch art, when a Protestant, mercantile republic with its prosperous burghers created great demand for small pictures for private homes. Johannes Vermeer, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch masterfully rendered interiors, light and the subtle psychology of everyday scenes. An earlier strong tradition had been established by the Fleming Pieter Bruegel the Elder with his peasant subjects. Later genre painting was developed by Jean-Baptiste Chardin in France and by the nineteenth-century Realists; it remains an important means of artistically reflecting on social life and human dignity in the everyday.