Christopher Allen’s art history series: history and genre
Art imitates life in re-creating visual stories of how ordinary folk lived and passed their time centuries ago
Last week we ended with the discussion of two Australian paintings of holdups by bushrangers: William Strutt’s melodramatic Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 (1887) and Tom Roberts’s much drier and more ambiguous Bailed Up! (1895, reworked 1927). The two pictures served to illustrate very different approaches to expression, which was the central concern of the genre of history painting. Strictly speaking, however, one could question whether these two pictures were really examples of history painting, since their subjects were not great or significant events, nor part of the canon of history subjects, and of local rather than universal interest.
Nonetheless, both artists approached their pictures in the same serious and systematic way as their earlier precursors, and both events are specific, rather than simply general examples of human behaviour.
This last criterion is perhaps the most important one that helps us distinguish, even when the boundary can sometimes be somewhat unclear, between true history painting and another kind of narrative art that is concerned with scenes of everyday life, whether represented as anecdotal or typical. This latter genre of painting is confusingly known as genre painting, but I will try to avoid that expression for the sake of clarity.
As already suggested, history paintings generally depict particular stories from a corpus of religious, historical or mythological tales that are broadly common to a culture. All, or at least all the more important figures in history paintings, are named individuals. In the scenes of everyday life that we are going to talk about now, figures are anonymous, types rather than individuals.
This fact brings us to a very important but sometimes overlooked corollary: although I referred to these pictures as narratives, that term has to be qualified. Images of anonymous people and types are scenes, but they are not truly stories. Or at least they are not inherently stories, a point that will become important in the later history of the genre.
Scenes of everyday life start, as do the other genres, from details or backgrounds of history painting, not only the senior genre but in a sense the mother genre. Details of everyday life may be used to animate more serious narrative subjects, and could sometimes proliferate to the point of distracting from what was meant to be the central focus of the picture, as notoriously occurred with Veronese’s monumental Feast at the House of Levi (1573) for which he was criticised at a hearing of the Venetian Inquisition.
So-called genre painting came into its own in the 16th century, particularly in the north of Europe, where its first great exponents were artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his followers. Scenes of markets and abundant produce were also popular, and some history subjects, such as Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, lent themselves to being colonised by maids bustling in kitchens.
In Italy, interest in such subjects was associated with northern naturalism, and even Annibale Carracci painted his Butcher’s Shop (early 1580s) — precursor of Rembrandt and Soutine — or Bean Eater (c. 1583-85) before assimilating first Venetian and then Roman influences to become the founder of the classical school.
Scenes of everyday life, including vulgar interiors with drunken peasants, were popular in Holland, in the work of painters such as Adriaen van Ostade, and Dutch artists brought such themes to Rome. One of them, Pieter van Laer, who was possibly a hunchback and nicknamed Bamboccio, the puppet, gave his name to the movement, and his followers were called Bamboccianti. In the more ambitious circles of Roman art, dominated by rival groups of Annibale’s followers, forming themselves into the alternative currents of classicism and the baroque, these northern naturalists were considered distinctly low-rent and not to be taken seriously.
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The interesting point, however, is that although the Bamboccianti had no status as serious artists, their works were nonetheless appreciated by collectors, both for their piquant views of the lives of beggars, thieves and other low-life, and for the freedom and virtuosity with which the best of them were executed.
The career of the brilliant young French painter Sebastien Bourdon reflects the place of these different genres and styles quite effectively. He came to Rome in 1636 and quickly mastered the Bambocciante style, producing a number of beautifully painted little pictures of gypsies and soldiers and similar subjects. Then, raising his sights higher, he learned to paint in the currently fashionable baroque style so that he could execute altarpieces.
Finally, he realised that the most highly regarded style of all was Poussin’s sober classicism, so he set himself to imitating his great compatriot before returning to Paris to become a founding professor at the new academy.
Paintings of everyday life subjects began to enjoy a higher status in the 18th century. Antoine Watteau’s work occupies an indeterminate position between genres, and although Chardin is best known for still life, his figure paintings fall into this category. In England, Hogarth adopted this inherently naturalistic genre of painting to compose what he called “modern moral pictures”. These were executed in series, and Hogarth made his money from their publication as engravings.
His most famous series were A Harlot’s Progress (1731), A Rake’s Progress (1732-34) and Marriage a la Mode (1743-45), of which the first two followed the decline, respectively, of a girl and a boy who come to London and fall into various forms of corruption, while the third is the tale of a modern marriage of convenience between the scion of a noble but impoverished family and the daughter of a rich and vulgar burgher.
As is clear from the language I have just used, Hogarth’s pictures are conceived as stories, and this is the point when scenes of everyday life begin to turn into narratives of everyday life, one of the clues being the attribution of proper names to the characters in Hogarth’s pictures.
And this is also, therefore, the point at which we come to a rather unexpected realisation. We are used to hearing that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in some cases this is true. But are pictures actually the best way to tell stories? The answer is that they are a wonderful way of illustrating or retelling stories that we already know, of making familiar tales marvellously vivid. Hence they are ideally suited to the genre of history painting, where the subjects belong to a cultural corpus of storytelling. But they are not very well suited to telling a story from scratch.
This becomes a problem for narrative painting from the mid-18th century and throughout the 19th as well. For reasons we shall consider next week, there was a decline in history painting during this period and the formerly minor genre of everyday life was enlisted and, as it were, upgraded to play a role analogous to that of history painting as a serious mode of narrative art.
The trouble is, however, that if you are trying to convey a story that is not otherwise known in a painting, you have to cram the composition with clues to help the viewer understand what is going on. In a history painting, it was usual to include a few symbols, but these were merely to identify the figure as a particular scriptural or literary figure; then we knew what to expect.
Hogarth’s pictures are full of such clues, hints and visual puns. This is acceptable in his case, both because he was working in a satirical mode and because the works were ultimately designed for publication, and part of the pleasure of the prints was to be packed with significant details and clues that revealed unexpected layers of the story, sometimes humorous and sometimes grim.
In the 19th century, however, Hogarth’s “modern moral pictures” developed grander pretensions, lost their biting sense of humour and often became ponderously moralistic or socially engaged. Huge compositions on the scale of history paintings were devoted to lamenting the fate of the urban poor, inviting us to weep over the fate of orphans, to deplore the fall of a wastrel, or to witness the conversion or alternatively the comeuppance of an immoral woman.
Of the countless examples one could cite, Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853) was in Australia recently, at the National Gallery of Australia’s outstanding Pre-Raphaelites from the Tate exhibition (2018-19). In this remarkable if visually and morally claustrophobic picture, a wealthy young man’s working-class mistress leaps up from his lap, struck by a sudden sense of the wrongness of her life and a glimpse of religious faith; everything in the composition, from the deshabille that she wears, suggesting her availability, to his dress, reminding us that he has come to call, and the opulence of the apartment in which he keeps her, as well as countless other symbolic motifs, help to make the story clear to audiences.
Such pictures were painted in the new colonies as well, and one of the most celebrated examples was the work with which the young John Longstaff earned the inaugural Travelling Scholarship awarded by the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in 1887, becoming the first Australian artist to win a bursary to pursue his studies in London and Paris.
Breaking the News (1887) is a fine example of the genre, largely avoiding the excesses of sentimentality, preaching and moralism found elsewhere. It evokes a mining accident, as does Arthur Streeton’s Fire’s On! (1891) painted only a few years later. But while Streeton’s picture is a landscape that both evokes and dwarfs the human tragedy, Longstaff’s is a narrative composition dominated by human actors.
He is concerned with the aftermath of the accident, when the body of a young miner is brought back to his widow and child. The corpse itself is being carried on a stretcher outside, but the main focus is on the encounter between a tall and white-bearded miner, the elder of the miners’ community, and the young woman who holds a child in her arms. Her distress is all the more effective for being restrained — caught at the moment of horrified realisation rather than grieving — and is balanced by the old man’s gravity.
The baby in the young woman’s arms is the most heartwrenching detail, but otherwise the pathos is low-key and settles gradually over viewers as they inspect the interior, painted as a series of fine still-life motifs: the table set for lunch, the few possessions on the mantelpiece and chest of drawers, humble but dignified.
It is not surprising this picture was much-reproduced and appealed to ordinary people in mining and other communities around Australia. Neither religious training nor erudition were necessary to understand its simple story of human suffering. But that was always one of the weaknesses of this kind of painting: unlike the vast scope of history painting, the affective range of these tales of contemporary life was generally limited to pathos and suffering.
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