Genres of painting
The hierarchy of genres
History Painting
Genre Painting
The hierarchy of genres
Even though painters constantly went beyond the limits of their assigned speciality, the hierarchy of genres remained an essential criterion in eighteenth-century painting. Jean-Antoine Watteau was the only one to invent a short-lived genre known as the fete galante . The genres were graded in order of importance, starting at the top: history painting , the portrait, genre painting, still-life and landscape.
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History Painting
History painting - the painting of scenes from classical and Christian history and mythology. It was taught in the academies of art, from the Renaissance to the 19th cent., as the highest form of art in an hierarchical grouping that ranked still-life painting lowest on the list. Included in the category were scenes from contemporary history, such as Velazquez's Surrender at Breda, and commemorative works and apotheoses, such as Rubens's Life of Marie de' Medici. Scenes from antiquity dominated 18th-century painting, and modern subjects were exalted by treating them in classical terms. A modern work cited as falling within the history-painting tradition is Picasso's Guernica.
History painting also known as the grand genre , it was the noblest form of art. The first painter to the king, the directors of the Academy and of the French Academy in Rome were always chosen from its exponents. What distinguished it from other genres was the importance laid on the human figure, rather than the severity of the subject, for, in the eighteenth century, history painting did not solely infer heroism and austerity. David, Jean-Francois de Troy , Noel Halle, Lemoyne, Natoire, Restout , Subleyras , Carle Van Loo Vien , and Vincent , but also Boucher and Jean-Honore Fragonard , all belonged to this category of painters. History painting included biblical scenes, religious scenes, historical scenes or scenes from Antiquity, occasionally embellished with symbolic or allegorical references, mythological scenes and subjects borrowed from more or less modern literary sources.
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Modern Portraiture
The portrait had been a major source of income to painters since the Renaissance, and many modern European masters became, perforce, adept at the art. The French impressionists, Manet, Modigliani, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Soutine, Klee, Kokoschka, Matisse, and Picasso are all known for their portraits, although for none of them was portraiture the principal subject matter.
Portraits were a relatively unimportant part of movements in painting and sculpture during the later 20th cent. until a revival that began in the 1970s. Artists such as Francis Bacon employed a combination of realism and abstraction in paintings that attempted to convey psychological insights as well as the form of the sitter. Active in this period and beyond were a number artists who create portraits in various figurative styles, painters such as Lucian Freud, Alice Neel, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Jamie Wyeth, and David Hockney.
In the 1990s a revival of interest in portraiture took place that involved many of the latter artists as well as a variety of new ones. This renewal accompanied a concern with the individuality and physicality of human identity, with multiculturalism, and with the mass media. Among the numerous contemporary artists exploring the portrait genre at the end of the 20th cent. are Chuck Close, with his billboard-size facial close-ups; Aaron Shikler, with his extremely realistic likenesses; and Robert Greene, with his fingertip-size studies.
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Genre Painting
In art-history terminology, a type of painting dealing with unidealized scenes and subjects of everyday life. Although practiced in ancient art, as shown by Pompeiian frescoes, and in the Middle Ages, genre was not recognized as worthy and independent subject matter until the 16th cent. in Flanders. There it was popularized by Pieter Bruegel, the elder. It flourished in Holland in the 17th cent. in the works of Ter Borch, Brouwer, Metsu, De Hooch, Vermeer, and many others, and extended to France and England, where in the 18th and 19th cent., its major practitioners were Watteau, Chardin, Greuze, Morland, and Wilkie. In Italy genre elements were present in Carpaccio's and Caravaggio's paintings, but not until the 18th cent. did genre become the specialty of an Italian artist, Pietro Longhi. The French impressionists often painted genre subjects as did members of the American ashcan school.
Sometimes termed the petit genre , or the genre scene, it was often anecdotal and light-hearted . Inspired by XVIIth-century Dutch painting, it usually depicted interior scenes or scenes from everyday life. With subjects and sizes adapted to the cosy interiors of the period, the genre was much appreciated, especially by the bourgeoisie. History painters like Boucher had so few qualms about tackling this genre, which flourished throughout the century, that it was sometimes difficult to discern the border between grand genre and petit genre . Thus, despite his efforts to be admitted as a history painter, Greuze was only accepted by the Academy in the genre-scene category.
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