| This thesis studies genre painting in the context of art theory, the art market, art and literary criticism, and the workings of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France. It elucidates why and by what means genre scenes were kept to the margins of official French culture until the 1770s. Sources consulted include theoretical texts, Academy records, inventories of property, auction catalogues, Salon reviews, critical writings, and fiction.;The first chapter considers genre painting and the hierarchy of subject types. It traces the tradition of subject ranking from Porphyry to Renaissance sources to Andre Felibien. Contrary to accepted wisdom, Felibien's renowned statement of 1668 was not highly influential, and detailed subject ranking was not a feature of French eighteenth-century art theory. Genre painting was for decades considered to be a kind of history painting.;A second chapter charts the response of the French Royal Academy to genre pictures. Examination, year by year, of the way artists were received into the Compagnie reveals that the genre category was victim of both hostile institutional strategy and benign neglect. Aspects of this information are tabulated in an appendix.;The third chapter looks at genre paintings in the marketplace, where interest in the subject type by collectors of differing social rank was overshadowed by dealers' steadfast published endorsements of Italian pictures. The critical reception of genre painting at the Academy Salons is the focus of a fourth chapter, which demonstrates that unsettled patterns of word use effectively suppressed the identity of the genre type. Categories of paintings exhibited at the Salons are tabulated in a second appendix.;New fiction and painted anecdotal subject matter shared a rocky road to official acceptance. The final chapter studies the interplay of terms and ideas between critics of the novel and commentators on genre painting. Women emerge as central to the critical fortunes of genre scenes, at first indicted as poor art critics and promoters of inferior, popular painting, and by the later eighteenth century embraced as champions of a new moral rectitude in art. |
