Understanding History and Society through Images, 1776-1914

Art Historical Background

Genre Painting

The painting suggested for classroom use fall under the categorical heading of Genre Painting. Genre painting proliferated between 1830 up to the Civil War and sought to show an idealized version of everyday life. It "drew on generalizations about social groups that developed during periods of intense change". ⁷ Genre painting used typing in order to create social constructions that paralleled the everyday life of average Americans. Typing is a natural and frequent act of human nature and specifically, in antebellum America these cultural constructions were formed to foster the fleshing out of status in the newly formed sovereignty. ⁸

Before and after the Civil War changes in the depiction of black people can be detected. ⁹ There is a shift from showing slaves in caricatured form, or only in subservience to whites. ¹⁰ Additionally, however, shortly after the Civil War, genre painting died off altogether. While this can partly be explained by changes in taste, with new forms of art entering the United States from France, it also reflects the fact that, because the North and South were so polarized, painters of black subjects were unsure how to portray life in a way that would be appealing to both audiences. ¹¹

These paintings are of particular use for this unit, as they effectively show a more utopian version of American life, particularly in relation to slavery, which must be deconstructed and unpacked to realize the actuality of the scene. One scholar provides the caveat: "Although genre painting appears to reproduce everyday life, in fact, it only renders a version of it shaped according to certain social, political or class imperatives…in other words, [it] employs a realistic style to create a fantasy of public and private life". ¹² Another critic remarks that the efforts of genre paintings as a vehicle to express African-Americans as a "serious examining [of them] as candidate, if not for suffrage, then at least for a place in the social constituency that was something other than explicitly marginal". ¹³ This is placed in opposition to Native Americans, who were not even shown in genre paintings, being outside of the pale of society all together.

As Dr. Barringer has aptly pointed out, painting is fiction, not fact. Painting is in fact ideology, not historical record, and therefore, often portrays human elements, as the artist believes they should be, not necessary how they are truly. The artist leaves clues for the viewer to uncover in order to uncover the reality behind the work. This type of analysis charges the educator with the task of creating a framework for students to understand and apply these ideological perceptions to the historical reality. The method and framework for this type of reading is provided in the Strategies section below.