NGA: Themes in American Art: Everyday Life

Scenes from Everyday Life

The term "genre" refers to depictions of scenes from daily life. Genre painting developed in seventeenth-century Europe, specifically in the Netherlands, when newly gained prosperity generated a large middle class and led to broad-based patronage of art. Genre emerged in America about two centuries later, when the ambitions and optimism of the young country gave rise to a public eager for pictures of people at work and play.

The earliest genre paintings were scenes of rural and frontier life. These works showed Americans engaged in everyday activities such as farming, sewing, hunting, skating, relaxing, and socializing. Virtually any occasion or setting served as subject matter: a festive flax scutching bee in a frontier barnyard, completion of the daily chores, or an assembly in a public square. Even the death of a loved one was a typical subject for genre. In each case, the artist conveys a sense of the familiar through action, atmosphere, and detailed setting.

Genre at its best provides a convincing view of daily life while also communicating aspects of universal experience that transcend the specific incident portrayed. After the Civil War, one of the leading practitioners of genre was Eastman Johnson, whose paintings of childhood and domestic life won him great popularity. In the mid-nineteenth century, Winslow Homer's images of sailing, hunting, and other pastimes are among the most renowned in American art. Thomas Eakins' depictions of rowing and leisure represent a high point of naturalism and precise observation. These works resonate far beyond descriptive storytelling.

During the late nineteenth century, impressionists developed new techniques of rendering light and color using scenes of leisure and entertainment. American expatriates adopted the subjects popularized by the impressionsists, as in Mary Cassatt's boating party on the French Riviera. Similarly, James McNeill Whistler's gathering at a dockside table in London, and John Singer Sargent's glimpse of a Venetian street, are transitions from the portraiture for which they were better known. After working in Europe, American impressionists William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and Edmund C. Tarbell also experimented with the art of genre. These works often focused on life in the country and refined domestic pursuits, as evident in Chase's sparkling depiction of a social visit, A Friendly Call.

In the early twentieth century, interpretation of modern urban life became an important element of American genre. A level of social commentary was added by members of the Ashcan school with the weary laborers depicted by George Luks and the bloodied boxers of George Bellows. Between the World Wars, artists such as Guy Pène du Bois and Edward Hopper depicted urban scenes, often with a sense of isolation and melancholy appropriate to the Great Depression.

Following World War II, the rise of abstract art overshadowed traditional representation. But in the late twentieth century figurative painting returned, and imagery from popular and consumer culture were incorporated into a contemporary version of genre. Works by artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Red Grooms invest a traditional style with a new dimension of playfulness and social irony.

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