18th century AD

Genre paintings portray the rituals and routines of life in a visually compelling way. They are generally intimate in scale and are usually painted in a realistic style with naturalistic colors and an eye for detail. Often they tell a story or elucidate a moral truth, and for these reasons they are readily accessible and appealing to modem audiences. At the same time, their imagery is intimately bound to the historical moment in which they were created.

In France, genre painting was a branch of art only grudgingly acknowledged until it came into its own in the eighteenth century. Jean Francois de Troy's Declaration of Love (Pl. III) and The Garter (cover and Pl. V) are excellent examples of the tableau de mode (fashionable picture), a type of genre painting that de Troy invented.(1) These glimpses of intimate moments in the lives of the Parisian upper classes re-create with great fidelity the look and feel of contemporary costumes and decor. They also convey a current of sexual intrigue representing two strategies of seduction. In The Declaration of Love the suitor pleads his case on bended knee. The setting is a fashionable sofa set into the rococo paneling. In The Garter the man has risen from his chair to help the woman attach her garter, and has been rebuked. De Troy took great pleasure in depicting the opulence and decorative effect of French interiors. In each picture fictive works of art comment on the flirtations in progress. Thus in The Declaration Mars and Venus embrace in a painting set into the wall, and in The Garter a bronze nude adorns the elaborate gilded console table.

Unlike Dutch and Flemish genre painters, who depicted the full range of public activities, from concerts to tavern brawls, their eighteenth-century French counterparts favored the rituals of aristocratic courtship, family life, and household routines. French genre painters most often depicted women rather than men, who, by contrast, populate a significant percentage of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre paintings.

Francois Boucher's splendid Milliner (Morning) (Pl. IV) exemplifies the sort of genre painting produced during the reign of Louis XV (1723-1774). It is the only one that was completed of a projected series of four representations of the times of day commissioned by Louisa Ulrica, the crown princess of Sweden.(2) The encyclopedic view of a well-to-do woman's boudoir captures the elegant proportions of the paneling (into which a landscape painting has been set), the finely crafted furnishings, and the opulent fabrics. The young woman dresses before a mirror and turns to examine ribbons being shown to her by a youthful milliner, who kneels respectfully.

Jean Simeon Chardin's Saying Grace (Pl. II) takes us into a middle-class interior.(3) The furnishings are simple and functional, yet there is a modest prosperity evident in the brightly colored upholstery and the matching set of painted crockery (rather than pewter, as was more common). The little boy at the left saying grace has put aside his toy drum. His mother and sister wear bonnets trimmed with lace and fled with colorful ribbons. Like Boucher, Chardin celebrates the woman at home, here specifically shown in her role as a moral guide to her children.

We know from the study of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art that apparent truth to nature in genre painting often masks metaphorical allusion and symbolic meaning,(4) as is evident in the commentary offered by the fictive works of art in Plates III and V. Boucher's painting may also contain an underlying message about the woman spending an inordinate amount of time on her appearance. An engraving of the painting (Fig. 2) suggests this interpretation in verses that read (in translation):

The gods took pleasure in making you perfect, and these vain ornaments that you wrongly assume do nothing but hide your real beauty.

The poem goes on to claim that to win a lover's heart one must remain simple and natural "without makeup and finery."(5) All in all, the poem reflects a more general critique of women in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, warning that their increasingly powerful hold over men was frequently achieved through deception and seduction.(6) The implication of Boucher's painting seems to be that the young lady is herself as much an example of contemporary fashion as her lavish boudoir and costume.

The engravings after Chardin's genre scenes also offer commentary, although it is usually more banal. An example is these verses appended to the engraving of Saying Grace:

The sister slyly laughs at her little brother Who stammers out his grace. He hurries through his prayer without troubling himself, His appetite is the reason.(7)

Such a mundane and anecdotal interpretation was probably added to the print to make it salable to a wider audience, but it misses Chardin's wonderfully evocative depiction of a private moment between a mother and her children. As a contemporary commentator remarked of the painting, "How elegant, how natural, and true! The viewer feels more than he can put into words."(8)