Painting

Photography changed the practice of portraiture in painting for much of the 20th century, except where artists such as Cézanne and Braque used it as a subject for structural research or—like Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Francis Bacon—for the expression of a personal vision beyond the scope of the camera. In roughly the last third of the 20th century, however, a number of painters, including Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, and Alex Katz, again took up portraiture. Genre

Limburg brothers: January from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de BerryThe illustration for January from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, manuscript illuminated by the Limburg brothers, 1416; in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.The Granger Collection, New York

Vermeer, Johannes: Young Woman with a Water PitcherYoung Woman with a Water Pitcher, oil on canvas by Johannes Vermeer, c. 1662; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. 45.7 × 40.6 cm.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889 (89.15.21), www. metmuseum.orgGenre subjects are scenes from everyday life. Hunting expeditions and tribal rituals figure in prehistoric rock paintings. Domestic and agricultural occupations, with banquet scenes of feasting, dancing, and music, were traditional subjects for ancient Egyptian tomb murals. East Asian hand scrolls, albums, and screens brilliantly describe court ceremonies, the bustle of towns, and the hardships of the countryside. The depiction of earthly pursuits was forbidden under the strict iconography prescribed by the early Christian Church, but the later illuminated Books of Hours provide enchanting records of the festivals and occupations of northern European communities. In Renaissance painting, genre subjects were generally restricted to background features of portraits and historical narratives. Domestic scenes, however, not only provided Bruegel with subjects for moral allegories but, as with Rembrandt, were used to counterpoint the emotional intensity of a dramatic religious theme. The withdrawal of religious patronage in northern Europe directed painters toward secular subjects. The rich period of genre painting in the 17th-century Netherlands is represented by the interiors, conversation pieces, and scenes of work and play by David Teniers the Younger, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Judith Leyster, Gerard Terborch, Pieter de Hooch, Adriaen van Ostade, and, the finest, by Johannes Vermeer. Pictures of rustic life had a special appeal for collectors in 18th-century France and England; these were the somewhat picturesque representations of peasant life painted by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Boucher, George Morland, and Gainsborough. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s paintings of servants and children, however, exhibit a timeless dignity and grandeur. The harsher realities of working life were depicted by Jean-François Millet, Daumier, Courbet, van Gogh, and Degas; the robust gaiety of cafés and music halls was captured by Toulouse-Lautrec, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and Walter Richard Sickert; and intimate domestic scenes were recorded by Bonnard and Vuillard. Modern genre movements have included the American Scene painters, the Ashcan and Kitchen Sink schools (represented by such painters as George Wesley Bellows, Jack Smith, and Derrick Greaves), the Camden Town and Euston Road groups (Frederick Spencer Gore, Sir William Coldstream, and Victor Pasmore), and the Social Realists in England and in the United States (Robert Henri, Stuart Davis, and Maurice Prendergast).

Landscape

“Waterfall,” oil painting by Jacob van Ruisdael, c. 1670?; in the Uffizi, FlorenceScala/Art Resource, New York

The Doges' Palace and Piazza San Marco, Venice, oil on canvas by Canaletto; in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.Scala/Art Resource, New YorkIdealized landscapes were common subjects for fresco decoration in Roman villas. Landscape painting (as exemplified by a Chinese landscape scroll by Gu Kaizhi dating from the 4th century) was an established tradition in East Asia, where themes such as the seasons and the elements held a spiritual significance. In Europe, imaginary landscapes decorated 15th-century Books of Hours. The first naturalistic landscapes were painted by Dürer and Bruegel. Landscapes appeared in most Renaissance paintings, however, only as settings to portraits and figure compositions. It was not until the 17th-century Dutch and Flemish schools—of Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, Aelbert Cuyp, Rubens, and Hercules Seghers—that they were accepted in the West as independent subjects. The most significant developments in 19th-century painting, however, were made through the landscapes of the Impressionists and the Neo-Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Styles in landscape painting range from the tranquil, classically idealized world of Poussin and Claude, the precise, canal topography of Francesco Guardi and Canaletto and the structural analyses of Cézanne to the poetic romanticism of Samuel Palmer and the later Constables and Turners and the exultant pantheism of Rubens and van Gogh. Modern landscapes vary in approach from the Expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka’s cities and rivers, Maurice de Vlaminck’s wintry countrysides, and John Marin’s crystalline seascapes to the metaphysical country of Ernst, Dalí, and René Magritte and the semi-abstract coastlines of Nicolas de Stael, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, and Richard Diebenkorn.

Still life

The earliest European still-life painting is usually attributed to Jacopo de’ Barbari (i.e., Dead Bird, 1504). In Western paintings, still life often appears as a minor feature of the design; but until the 17th century it was not generally painted for its own sake, although it was already traditional to East Asian art. The subject is particularly associated with northern European painting, and the choice of objects very often has a religious or literary significance: wine, water, and bread symbolizing the Passion; skulls, hourglasses, and candles, the transience of life; and selected flowers and fruits, the seasons. Flower painting, especially, held a spiritual and emotional meaning for Japanese artists and for 19th-century European painters, such as Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, and van Gogh. Still life has been expressed in many different ways: Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s witty arrangements of fruit, flowers, and vegetables made into fantastic allegorical heads and figures; the sensuous representation of food by Frans Snyders, Goya, and William Merritt Chase; the trompe l’oeil illusionism of Alexandre-François Desportes and William Harnett; the formal decoration of folk artists or untrained artists such as Henri Rousseau and Séraphine and of modern painters such as Matisse, Dufy, and Pat Caulfield; the semi-abstract designs of Picasso, Gris, and William Scott; and, probably at its highest level of expression, the majestic still lifes of Chardin, Cézanne, and Giorgio Morandi.

Desportes, Alexandre-François: Still Life with Dressed Game, Meat, and FruitStill Life with Dressed Game, Meat, and Fruit, oil on canvas by Alexandre-François Desportes, 1734; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 121 × 95 cm.Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Chester Dale Fund, 2012.11.1 Other subjects

Since ancient times, animals and birds have provided the primary subject matter of a painting or have been included in a design for their symbolic importance. In the paintings of prehistoric caves and dynastic Egyptian tombs, for example, animals are portrayed with a higher degree of naturalism than human figures. Their texture, movement, and structure have provided some artists with a primary source of inspiration: the classical, anatomical grace of a George Stubbs racehorse and a more romantic interpretation in the ferocious energy of a Rubens and Géricault stallion; the vivid expression of rhythmically co-ordinated movements of deer by Tawaraya Sotatsu and Antonio Pisanello; the weight and volume of George Morland’s pigs and Paul Potter’s cows; the humanized creatures of Gothic bestiaries and of Edward Hicks’s Peaceable Kingdom; and, finally, Dürer’s The Hare, which is possibly as famous as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.