Signed Antique Genre Painting Oil on Canvas. A balding scruffy man in the Impressionist style nonchalantly reads the newspaper. Signed indistinctly upper right. 

Overall Size: 14 X 12 in. 

Sight Size: 9 1/2 X 7 1/4 in. 

#4898 . 

Genre painting (or petit genre), a form of genre art, depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attached either individually or collectively, thus distinguishing it from history paintings (also called grand genre) and portraits. The depictions can be realistic, imagined, or romanticized by the artist. Because of their familiar and frequently sentimental subject matter, genre paintings have often proved popular with the bourgeoisie, or middle class. The subject has been popular for thousands of years, as evidenced by painted decorations in ancient Egyptian tombs that depict banquets, recreation, and agrarian scenes. Peiraikos is mentioned by Pliny the Elder as a Hellenistic panel painter of “low” subjects, such as survive in mosaic versions and provincial wall-paintings at Pompeii that display barber shops, cobbler stalls, and livestock. Medieval illuminated manuscripts often illustrated scenes of everyday peasant life, especially in the Labours of the Months in the calendar section of books of hours, most famously the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The Low Countries dominated the field until the 18th Century, and in the 17th Century both Flemish Baroque painting and Dutch Golden Age painting produced numerous specialists who mostly painted genre scenes. The skill of these artists who chose “common” people and scenes to paint is evidenced in their proliferation over time, as well as the inclusion of symbols and hidden meanings, often humorous, sexually suggestive, or politically satirical. With the decline of religious and historical painting in the 19th Century, artists increasingly found their subject matter in the life around them. Realists upset expectations by depicting everyday scenes in large canvases of a scale traditionally reserved for “important” subjects, blurring the boundary which had set genre painting apart as a “minor” category. History painting itself shifted from the exclusive depiction of events of great public importance to the depiction of genre scenes in historical times, both the private moments of great figures, and the everyday life of ordinary people. Japanese ukiyo-e prints, which gained tremendous popularity by the 18th Century and were primarily concerned with the affairs and doings of people across all social classes at work and in leisure, became a powerful inspiration to European artists, influencing Western genre painting and even leading to entire movements in both arts and crafts, centered around the functional, personal, and intimate aspects of lower and middle class life. Subsequently the Impressionists as well as many 20th Century artists throughout Europe painted scenes of daily life, but in the context of modern art the term “genre painting” has come to be associated mainly with painting of an especially anecdotal or sentimental nature, painted in a traditionally realistic technique.