Looking Past the Mirror: Genre Painting Taken Seriously

Abstract

Three new publications on French eighteenth-century art are distinguished by their productive strategies for reconsidering and interpreting genre painting (Here I am consciously using the term "genre" in its more inclusive and etymological sense as comprising all categories of subject matter, with the exception of history painting, such as portraiture, animal painting, landscape, and still life.) Although each of the volumes discussed here focuses on a single painter, none is a monograph in the traditional sense. Colin Bailey studies one painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, an image of a maidservant, proposing artistic and social contexts through which the work could be interpreted in eighteenth-century terms. Paula Radisich selects four sets of varied works by Hubert Robert, and not his most familiar landscapes, considering the subjects of individual images with reference to the series, setting, patronage, and artistic values and ideologies shared by the artist and his viewers. Julie Plax uses a rich combination of approaches for the study of several of Antoine Watteau's paintings of contemporary society, offering new historical information and ideological contexts related to cultural politics at the end of the reign of Louis XIV.