Genre Scenes

(noun)

Genre works, also called genre scenes or genre views, are pictorial representations in any of various media that represent scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes.

Related Terms

Examples of Genre Scenes in the following topics:

  • Modern Life

    • Impressionist painters captured genre scenes of contemporary life, demolishing the traditional hierarchy of subject matter in painting.
    • Scenes from the bourgeois care-free lifestyle, as well as from the world of entertainment, such as cafés, dance halls, and theaters were among their favorite subjects .
    • In their genre scenes of contemporary life, these artists tried to arrest a moment in their fast-paced lives by pinpointing specific atmospheric conditions—light flickering on water, moving clouds, city lights falling over dancing couples .

  • Types of Content

    • Content in art takes the form of portraits, landscapes, still-lifes, genre, and narrative.
    • Among them are portraiture, landscape, still-life, genre, and narrative.
    • Genre art is the pictorial representation in any of various media of scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes.
    • Such representations (also called genre works, genre scenes, or genre views) may be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist.
    • Dutch Baroque genre scenes often have important moral lessons as their subtexts.

  • Landscape Art and Interior Painting

    • These genre paintings represented scenes or events from everyday life, such as markets, domestic interiors, parties, inn scenes, and street scenes.
    • Adriaen Brouwer is acknowledged as the Flemish master of peasant tavern scenes.
    • Jan Vermeer specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life; though he was long a very obscure figure, he is now the most highly regarded genre painter of Dutch history.
    • Vermeer is a confirmed master of Dutch genre painting known for his interior scenes of middle class life.
    • Evaluate Dutch landscape and interior genre painting in the 17th century

  • Ter Brugghen, van Honthorst, Hals, Leyster

    • Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Frans Hals, and Judith Leyster were important genre painters of the Dutch Republic.
    • Honthorst cultivated the style of Caravaggio and had great skill at chiaroscuro, often painting scenes illuminated by a single candle.
    • Apart from portraiture, he is known for painting tavern scenes with musicians, gamblers, and people eating.
    • Leyster was particularly innovative in her domestic genre scenes.
    • In them, she creates quiet scenes of women at home, which were not a popular theme in Holland until the 1650s.

  • Flemish Painting in the Baroque Period

    • These genres included history, portraiture, genre, landscape, and still life paintings.
    • History painting, considered the most noble genre during the 17th century, was comprised of depictions of historical, biblical, mythological, and allegorical scenes.
    • Genre paintings depict scenes from everyday life and were very common in 17th century Flanders.
    • Brouwer is known for painting his subjects in interior, rather than exterior, scenes.
    • Wolf and Fox Hunt is an example of the monumental hunting scene Rubens introduced to painting.

  • Art for Aristocrats

    • The many innovations of Pieter Brueghel the Elder drew on the fertile artistic scene in Antwerp.
    • It focused on scenes from everyday life, including landscapes, still life, and genre painting.
    • Toward the mid-1500s Pieter Aertsen, later followed by his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer, established a type of "monumental still life" featuring large spreads of food with genre figures, and in the background small religious of moral scenes.
    • Like the world landscapes, these represented a typically "Mannerist inversion" of the normal decorum of the hierarchy of genres, giving the "lower" subject matter more space than the "higher".

  • Chiaroscuro

    • A particular genre that developed was the nocturnal scene lit by candlelight, which drew from the innovations of Caravaggio and Elsheimer.
    • The nocturnal candle-lit scene later re-emerged in the Dutch Republic in the mid-seventeenth century on a smaller scale in the works of artists such as Gerrit Dou and Gottfried Schalken.

  • Categorizing Art

    • A genre is a set of conventions and styles within a particular medium.
    • Genres in music include death metal and rip hop.
    • Genres in painting include still life and pastoral landscape.
    • A particular work of art may blend or combine genres but each genre has a recognizable group of conventions, clichés and tropes.
    • (One note: the word genre has a second older meaning within painting; genre painting was a phrase used in the 17th to 19th centuries to refer specifically to paintings of scenes of everyday life and is still used in this way. )

  • Impressionism

    • Urban scenes were also popular subjects for Impressionists.
    • For women artists, domestic scenes were common subject matter.
    • The genre of landscape painting dates back well over a thousand years.
    • In other genres, the landscape behind figures can still be an important part of the work.
    • Within the Western tradition of painting, impressionists transformed the landscape genre significantly.

  • Revolution in France

    • Although the hierarchy of genres continued to be respected officially, genre painting, landscape, portrait and still life were extremely fashionable in the aftermath of the revolutionary period.
    • In the early nineteenth century, elements of Romanticism such as Orientalism, Egyptian motifs, the tragic anti-hero, the wild landscape, the historical novel, and scenes from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, created a vibrant period of art that defies easy classification.