The idea of hybridity would seem to challenge the status of genre categories and more generally the stability of the hierarchical classification of art in eighteenth-century France.  This paper is concerned with the ambiguities of genre painting in that period.  It sets out several modes of ambiguity, exploring the particularly rich array of interchanges between portraiture and genre -- portraits inserted into genre scenes, genre paintings that act like portraits, and portraits staged like genre types.  The combination of different pictorial conventions in the same painting produced an indeterminacy in the narrative situation and in the viewer’s relation to the work:  it is often unclear whether one is looking at a self-contained scene or at a pictorial construction that takes account of the viewer.  The incorporation of the idea of gender in the French term genre opens onto another kind of ambiguity, for in many cases the indeterminacy of the viewing experience was gendered in the feminine.  The essay concludes by exploring the increasingly privileged depiction of women as mediators of the viewing of art and the thematisation of that in genre paintings that depict portraits as a narrative device.  

Ways of Looking

An intriguing instability results for the viewer from conflicted ways of looking at a painting that are invited by a combination of portrait and genre elements. The deliberate combination of these two quite different modes of image-making is exemplified in Nicolas Lancret’s work from the early eighteenth century.  In his so-called Bourbon-Conti Family (1734; Fig 1), a portrait group is situated next to a genre episode of a woman fending off a man, recalled from an earlier painting (Fig 2):  we read the women in the Bourbon-Conti Family as portraits because they present themselves stiffly to us and look out, and the particularities of their faces and costumes differentiate them from the more generalized register of the struggling couple, who take no notice of their presence nor indeed of ours.  The incongruity of this juxtaposition is striking.  Although figures in the middle mediate between the portrait and genre groups, the meaning of their mediation is unclear. Yet the juxtaposition was evidently meant to increase the viewer’s pleasure because it was by no means an isolated case in Lancret’s oeuvre.  In the Luxembourg Family (Fig 3), a bagpipe-player has been inserted between the Luxembourg women and his relation to them remains similarly enigmatic.  Is he to be understood as an eye-catching pastoral motif, a kind of fashion accessory whose splendid red costume sets off their dresses à la bergère, or, in seeming to eye the mistress while playing his instrument, was he meant to comment suggestively on the allure of women who fish and collect flowers, who in short get close to nature?[1]

The ambiguity produced by combining portrait and genre elements became more pronounced, and paradoxically less disjunctive, later in the century, when pressures were brought to bear on the issue of categorisation by the attempts of the French Académie royale des beaux-arts to uphold the honor of history painting.  Louis-Roland Trinquesse’s The Music Party, from 1774, is a good example (Fig. 4).  In its reach for tropes of femininity, Trinquesse’s painting deviates flagrantly from the masculinized discourse that was then being mobilized to validate the exclusive status of history painting. The sheer scale of the woman in white and her direct solicitation of our gaze impose her presence on us as a full-length portrait might, yet she is engaged in making music with other actors in the scene who are oblivious to our presence.  Her detachment from the group would be reinforced if, as has been suggested, this painting belonged to a decorative ensemble by Trinquesse that included other purely fictional scenes (Fig. 4b).[2]  The female figure sets up an oscillation between genre and portraiture.  On the one hand her facingness breaks the fiction of the scene. She is said to represent Marianne Franméry, the young wife of the composer François Etienne Franméry, one of the artist’s favorite models.[3]  On the other hand, in looking out she brings us into the scene and makes us party to a sentimental exchange unfolding between the man and woman behind her.  This playful, slightly disjunctive, oscillation between genre and portraiture is different from the “mixed style” or blended “union” of genres that Joshua Reynolds advocated at the time—Reynolds being, along with William Hogarth, the period’s leading apologist for hybrid forms of painting—because it holds in suspension two different ways of responding to the work:  once one entertains the idea that the lady might be a portrait, one’s perception of the scene shifts so that it seems at once more real and more artificial.[4]   This effect is heightened in Trinquesse’s case by the extreme artificiality of his work. The Music Party is an astonishingly big and brassy thing, with glistening textures and brilliant colors that assert its fictionality as a painting.   

Paintings like these break open the self-contained world of art.  They depart from the absorptive mode that characterized some of the most powerfully affective genre and history painting of the period, work by Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jacques-Louis David that elicited a passionately empathetic response from viewers.[5]  Running parallel to this empathetic mode of painting was an equal fascination with breaking the absorptive spell of painting by incorporating figures that either acted like portraits or actually were portraits of historical figures.  These portrait elements operated in a lower key of fantasy than fictional ones, but in fantasy all the same, by drawing viewers into concrete social situations that were made to seem familiar.  The desire to see art represent familiar settings and situations was articulated at the time by Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn, a cosmopolitan figure who was general director of the art collections in Dresden.  Von Hagedorn wrote that he wanted to see people like himself depicted in paintings—“our . . . yearning to find ourselves amongst our own kind, enjoying the pleasures of bourgeois life.”[6] 

Conceptual Instability

The instability in ways of looking at paintings that I am highlighting here can be seen as symptomatic of an instability that lodges in the notion of genre painting itself, which both is and is not a category.  The eighteenth century was fascinated with hierarchy, categories, and conventions, as we know, and attempted to organize knowledge into schemes that were based on rational criteria rather than on custom and nature.  At the same time, however, there was an equal fascination with opening those categories up and crossing their boundaries.  Embracing extremes of difference within a single work was one manifestation of this tendency to push at the limits of classification.  A good artistic example is François-Hubert Drouais’s Family Portrait, a large-scale painting composed in the tradition of grand aristocratic portraiture that looked to François Boucher’s much smaller genre scene of The Milliner for its mapping of sociability (Figs 5 and 6).[7]  Another example is Denis Diderot’s insistence on the importance of history painting even as he praised Jean-Siméon Chardin in his still-lifes for painting like the Creator.[8]   It is worth insisting on this dual movement between definition and fluidity, between a progressive tightening of categories and their continual subversion, in view of recent attempts to define French genre painting teleologically, as the outcome of an evolution of the hierarchy of genres that emerged as a consensual category, with its own canon of subjects, by the 1780s.[9]  Eh voilà, the short, the beautiful, eighteenth century.

In theoretical terms genre painting is interesting precisely because of the conceptual confusion it represents.  Anyone who has tried explaining it to students will recognize this:  “there are genres, one of which is genre,” or “genre painting is a kind of genre.”   It’s a double negative.  Genre painting was the left-over category, a grab-bag (rather like the novel) into which everything that did not fit was put, and the terms of its clarification by the 1780s were achieved antithetically:  it was not history painting, not portraiture, not landscape or flower painting or still-life, not too lowly Dutch-looking or too symbolically moralizing (or perhaps one should say that it was half-Dutch and not Italian-looking, not Piazetta nor Domenicho Tiepolo-style frescoes), the social milieus depicted in France were not only low but also high.  French culture backed into genre painting.  I am interested in this idea of it as “the unsayable of a generic system” of art.[10]  We might consider that as its use-value, to take up Thomas Beebee’s and Frederic Jameson’s understandings of genre (in literature) as, respectively, “a system of differences without positive terms” and a “social contract,” defined by social function rather than formally (especially in Beebee’s work) by a set of positive or essential traits.[11]  It follows from defining genre as the form of its use that it is inherently unstable, which keeps the accent on heterogeneity rather than purity and on volatility and flux rather than fixity and canonicity.  The idea of genre as a system of differences requires us to focus on the borders between genres because it is precisely here, in their differences, that genres exist.      

 Indeterminacy

There was a lot of play with indeterminacy in the no man’s land between genre and portraiture, perhaps because it enabled certain social negotiations to take place.  There is a whole group of works characterized by uncertainty as to whether the figures depicted in them are portraits or genre types.  If the hunter in Lancret’s A Hunter and his Servant (Fig. 7) faced us there would be no doubt that the figure in question is a portrait; as it is we are not entirely sure.[12]  Some figures attract portrait identifications simply by virtue of looking out at us.  These genre figures behave like portrait figures do and appear as full-length or standing figures in paintings formatted like portraits.  The woman lounging on a chaise longue, looking unabashedly at us, in Boucher’s Presumed Portrait of Madame Boucher (Fig 8) has long been supposed to be the artist’s wife, although a recent interpretation persuasively argues that she is not.[13]  There is similarly no reason to believe that Louis-Léopold Boilly’s much-loved image of L’Optique (Fig 9) represents Georges Jacques Danton’s second wife, Sébastienne-Louis Gély, since this identification derived from an unverifiable assertion of a late nineteenth-century owner who claimed that the woman looked like the subject of a portrait miniature by Boilly that she owned, which was inscribed on the reverse as being Mademoiselle Gély.[14]  

The namings of these genre figures do attest, on the other hand, to a desire on the part of owners, publics, and scholars to read historical certainties into the generic.  People have made use of whatever knowledge they have to complete the meanings of these scenes.  This persistent, widespread urge to participate in genre paintings is quite interesting, and suggests that we ought to regard them as a form of social transaction rather than as failed absorptive fictions.[15] By the same token, the typological treatment of a portrait, such as Lancret’s A Hunter and his Servant (Fig 7), admits to the sitter’s or the patron’s desire to act out certain socially condoned roles.  In both cases a realm of fantasy is engaged, by portraits masquerading as genre and by the mistaken identities of genre figures.  If a known historical figure is inserted into a genre scene, his or her presence also serves to break down the boundaries between real and fictional worlds.   The recognition of a known personage invites one in:  instead of empathizing with characters in a dramatic or historical subject, as in Greuze’s and David’s paintings, these portrait-figures prompt viewers to imagine themselves as part of a vaguely familiar situation.

Well-known examples of paintings that incorporate portraits of known individuals into fictional scenes include Claude-Joseph Vernet’s and Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié’s great landscapes from the mid-1770s.  In Vernet’s Constructing a Main Road (Fig 10), the celebrated engineer Jean-Rodolphe Perronet is portrayed on horseback in the center. This identification comes from a contemporary review of the Salon of 1775 and might be difficult to sustain, given the small scale of the figures, were it not supported by the inclusion of idiosyncratic attributes such as the camion pysmatique and the wooden cranes that Perronet designed to unload and lift masonry (Figs. 10b and 10c).  In the pendant to this painting, Vernet’s The Approach to a Fair (1774; Musée Fabre, Montpellier), the inscription of presence is more discreet but still it is there, in the form of the names of patrons—first the abbé Terray, then the subsequent owner—stencilled onto the bales of merchandise in the foreground.  In Lépicié’s Interior of a Customs House (Figs. 11 and 11b), the artist projected himself into the scene in the role of a merchant or traveller, as the central figure in a green vest whose goods are being inspected, while his patron, the abbé Terray, stands next to him in black ecclesiastical garb, also cast as a traveller.[16]  These fictionalised roles of  artist and patron are analogous to the architectural setting, which incorporates elements of recognizable buildings, such as the curved gallery of the Paris Corn Exchange, into an otherwise idealized ensemble.  The paintings depend on an amalgam of fiction and reality:  just enough in them was recognizable to members of the original audience to facilitate an imaginative entry into the scenes.  The portrait-figures and portrait-building-elements functioned as reality-effects that made the scenes more vivid and lent a plausibility to their highly idealized, confidently optimistic, views of state-supervised social improvements and regulation of trade.[17] 

The Social Milieu of the Patron

The hybrid character of such paintings often resulted from patrons’ close involvement in their production.  The Terray pictures are a case in point.  The abbé Terray commissioned these paintings from Vernet and Lépicié with public exhibition in mind—they were shown at the Salon of 1775--since they reflected on his administrative positions as Contrôlleur-général des Finances and Directeur des bâtiments.[18]  Such public reference to a patron’s role was rather unusual, however, except through the exhibition of conventional portraits.  Most paintings that animated known individuals in fictional scenes were confined to the comparatively private domain of display in a domestic setting, such as the suite of paintings that Madame Geoffrin commissioned from Hubert Robert for her townhouse in Paris.[19] 

Patrons’ involvement in creating these hybrid paintings could extend to casting themselves or members of their family in leading roles. To move outside France to Venice, Gregorio Barbarigo commissioned scenes of himself and his wife hunting from Pietro Longhi.  These pendants, Shooting Merganser and Hunting the Hare (Figs. 12 and 13), show the patrons in action, with oarsmen and gamesmen who were portraits as well—two genre scenes composed almost entirely of portraits (Figs. 12b and 12c).  Such a portrayal was especially unusual in the female pendant:  although Caterina Sagredo, Barbarigo’s second wife, assumes a less animated pose than her husband, she is nevertheless shown as an accomplished markswoman.  The depiction of her prowess departs from conventional representations of women at the hunt, which show them as social accoutrements attending picnics (as for instance in Jean-François de Troy’s The Hunt Luncheon, 1737, Musée du Louvre, Paris). Barbarigo and Sagredo were among the most prominent families in Venice at the time, and hunting was an aristocratic pastime, so the proofs of ability given by these paintings confirmed the prerogatives of the patron’s social class. 

But even if we take Longhi’s paintings as affirmations of status, a certain  slippage takes place by virtue of depicting the patrons in action.  Genre painting that incorporated portraits risked representing the patrons in a socially ambivalent way since, compared with posed portraits, such as Longhi’s The Sagredo Family (1752; Querini Stampalia Gallery, Venice), they were play-acting in a narrative.  The aristocrat performing a role is an actor in a representation of social ritual.  The theatrical performativity of the patrons, and their appreciation of artifice, is foregrounded in pictures like these.  Such role-playing in art was comparable to playing charades or acting in private theatricals since the paintings were confined to relatively intimate domains of sociability. Longhi’s paintings for example originally hung in the Palazzo Barbarigo, where they formed part of a decorative ensemble on the theme of the hunt that included allegorical scenes of Diana and Endymion on the ceiling – an interior that delighted in the mixing of genres.[20]  In the end these patrons did not risk publicly subverting their class status by stepping into genre paintings because their display of the pictures remained within a social arena that they controlled. 

If such hybrid images entered into the public domain, however, the status of the sitter became less certain, at least within the realm of visual representation. Once Reynolds’ grand portraits were reproduced in mezzotint, as in Edward Fisher’s engraving after Lady Elizabeth Keppel (Fig 14), the ladies in them moved closer to appearing like actresses, who were commonly represented in dramatic or performing roles.[21]  The former actress and singer Mademoiselle Rosalie Duthé thought nothing of instructing Henri-Pierre Danloux to paint her in action, engaged in hanging a symbolically significant painting in her boudoir (Fig 15).[22]  

Women on display

This brings us to the issue of public display in hybrid images of women.  Although Rosalie Duthé had performed on stage, an experience that undoubtedly informed her staging of herself in action, her “portrait historiée” was not made for the public but rather for the private pleasure of her benefactor.  If women who could be identified assumed fantasy roles in genre paintings exhibited at the Salon, they were almost invariably artists’ wives. The sexual politics of retaining or alluding to a wife’s identity in paintings shown to the public involved the artist in trafficking in her social status, or her body, within the fantasy of his art.  

Carle van Loo exhibited a pair of paintings at the Salon of 1737,  A Pasha Having his Mistress’s Portrait Painted (Fig. 16) and The Grand Turk giving a Concert to his Mistress (Fig. 17), which cast his wife in the fantasized roles of erotic object and performer.[23]  He indulged in an unusual degree of autobiographical reference in the first scene, A Pasha Having His Mistress’ Portrait Painted (Fig. 16), a freedom that was presumably licensed by his execution of the painting for Jean de Jullienne, a patron who liked to involve himself in the painter’s craft and his world.  This rapprochement of patron and artist must have encouraged Van Loo to tell the story of his love life through this work.  He cast himself as the court painter in an oriental version of the story of the Greek painter Apelles, whose artistic skills earned him the emperor Alexander’s mistress.  The painting’s fiction recalled Van Loo’s history as court painter to the King of Sardinia in Turin a few years before, where he had met his wife, the singer Christina Antonia Somis, who is pictured as the Pasha’s mistress.  The slightly less personal pendant, The Grand Turk giving a Concert to his Mistress (Fig. 17), was painted for a different patron, a certain Fagon.  In it Christina Somis is cast as a harpsichordist, a role closer to her actual profession, who plays and sings for the Grand Turk and his mistress (modelled on a different woman).  The constant factor in both subjects was the fantasized projection of the artist’s wife into leading roles as mistress and as singer.  It would have unthinkable for Van Loo to exhibit these paintings in public had the portrait-figure not been his wife.  Her status as a foreigner and a professional singer also worked to condone his public allusion to her identity, particularly within the club-like atmosphere of the Academy’s exhibitions during the early decades of the century, when the assembly of acquaintances who collected in its rooms was not so far removed from the society gatherings at which Christina Somis performed. 

Thirty years later, when Greuze was exhibiting, the stakes of public exhibition had begun to change, and one way this artist courted notoriety was by repeatedly offering the voluptuous body of his wife to public display.[24]  The titillation was sometimes explicit, as in a study of her ecstatic expression for The Well-Loved Mother (Fig. 18) that Diderot described as a “paroxysm [of pain mixed with pleasure] that’s sweeter to experience than it is decorous to paint.”[25]  The compositional sketch for the painting was exhibited in the same year, 1765, and in it the erotically replete maternal figure modelled on Madame Greuze, a brood of children swarming over her body, was represented as the object of her husband’s astonished delight.  His contemplation of this spectacle authorized and modelled a voyeuristic pleasure for the viewer.  Indeed, Greuze seemed to toy with rumors about his wife’s morality and sexual availability by portraying her abandonment to the erotic pleasures of motherhood.  The line between fantasy and reality became even more precarious in the final painting, which was not publicly exhibited, by the insertion of a portrait of the patron, Jean-Joseph de Laborde, in the place of the husband (Fig. 19).  Laborde, an enormously wealthy man, was entertaining a social fantasy by projecting himself into a humble country abode, as well as a fantasy of fecundity and happiness associated with the middling and lower classes; he and his wife had many fewer children at the time than are pictured.  The Beloved Mother is a prime example of the ambiguities that result from combining genre and portraiture since the painting has divided scholarly opinion over whether it represents a somewhat fanciful family portrait, as traditionally assumed, or a genre scene with Laborde’s portrait inserted into a thoroughly fictional happy family.[26]

Exhibiting more decorum but no less complete a hold on the image of his wife, Noël Hallé depicted her as an artist in Portrait of Françoise-Geneviève Lorry and of her son Jean-Noël (Fig. 20), which he sent to the Salon of 1761.[27]  The painting shows Françoise-Geneviève Lorry absorbed in her work but minimizes her activity as an artist by feminising it.  Elaborately dressed, she has been drawing with India ink and watercolor rather than painting with oils.  Her maternity is emphasized by the presence of her son, who clings to her arm, a gesture that hinders her ability to draw, and also by the object of her contemplation, the sculpted bust of a little girl that she has rendered in her drawing as if it was the portrait of a real child.  Her wistful look at the drawing, and her son’s delighted look at it, too, signals a wish that she produce another real child, a little sister for the boy.  Hallé presented his family as a flattering extension of himself in this genre-portrait, offering his ravishing (and wealthy) young wife to the public as an object of delectation.  By casting her as an amateur artist, he recalled her lineage from several distinguished artists while at the same time reinforcing her subservience to his professionalism, and his control over her image, by emphasizing her new roles as wife and mother.

Woman as mediator of experience

“In French,” Jacques Derrida has pointed out, “the semantic scale of genre is much larger and more expansive than in English, and thus always includes within its reach the gender.”[28]  The grammatical inclusion of gender in the French connotations of genre opens onto another kind of ambiguity in the viewer’s relation to genre painting. The increasingly privileged depiction of women as mediators of the viewing of art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to gender aesthetic experience ambiguously – to open it up for consideration through a female subject position, while at the same time objectifying the woman pictured in conventional terms as an object of the (male) gaze.  But before exploring how that ambiguity is played out in painting, I want to start with a discussion of an essay by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that foregrounds the social mediation of the female subject in the experience of art.  Here, a central role is played by a female character and voice, and it is interesting how often a female voice was used by male authors in the eighteenth century to ventriloquize certain kinds of experience.  Pornographic novels were one of those domains, for which the narrators tended to be women, acting as the voice of sexual experience.[29]  The popularisation of modern science was another domain populated by women, who were represented in texts and paintings, and in the public galleries of learned societies and assembly rooms, as the main audience for science and its instruction.[30]  We might consider the aesthetic experience of art as another area that could be gendered in the feminine, at a popular level at least, and contrary to the masculine assumptions of artistic treatises and developments in history painting of the period.  

Goethe’s essay “The Collector and his Circle” was a didactic exercise in art appreciation that he wrote in 1799 for the Propyläen, one of the periodicals he founded. [31]  The essay represents art as eminently social affair.  It is seen and discussed in the semi-public domain of a private collector’s house that was open to visitors—one of those residential spaces that blurred the line between public and private in the eighteenth century.  Our understanding of the family’s and visitors’ experiences of art unfolds through the exceedingly social practice of writing letters to an absent relative, for Goethe’s essay assumes the epistolary form so typical of eighteenth-century sociability.  An important role is played by the collector’s granddaughter, Julie, who is entrusted to complete the correspondence because she has “an excellent memory for events . . . the edge on us in reasoning . . . [and] good will . . . most of all.”[32]  Julie’s role in the essay is as a guide to the social experience of art:  while the practical instruction on art comes from her grandfather, the collector, the social instruction on how to enjoy it and think about its moral and ethical implications comes from Julie.  A young philosopher visiting the collection, who nobody could understand, was delighted when “Julie also promised me playfully that she would teach me if I would be more sociable and sympathetic – I already feel she can do with me what she will.”[33]  When it came to art Julie’s own tastes ran to the modern – she liked Fuseli, vulgar caricatures, and saw nothing immodest about admiring a female nude, which shocked an older lady visitor.[34]  Elsewhere Julie asks “if you don’t think we women see more clearly than the men because we are less one-sided and allow to everyone his own.”[35]  This proclivity for balanced assessment was manifested in Julie’s concluding overview of art lovers’ tastes, a smorgasbord of possibilities that Goethe laid out for his readers.  The female voice acts here as a facilitator of multiplicity and open-ended possibility rather than articulating an exclusive set of standards.  In fact the image of Julie’s character that Goethe constructs is shifting and contradictory—in one moment she proudly defends her beliefs, in another she is self-deprecating.  The conversations that unfold in these letters were recorded for the benefit of a silent male audience, a young man in Dresden, the collector’s nephew, who stood to inherit the collection.  In the end the ballast of power over art remained firmly in masculine hands, like Goethe’s scripting of this essay for a journal he founded.  But it is interesting that for the benefit of his reading public he chose the character of a young woman, who is sympathetically portrayed as a lively, modern intelligence, as pivotal to the experience of learning about art.

Mediating the experience of art

The most obvious pictorial analogy of the Goethe essay is the way painting of the period features a female figure’s looking out at the viewer, mediating his or her experience of the picture as a work of art.  Looking out of a picture was analogous to using the first-person voice in epistolary novels of the period:  it was an invitation to identify with the subject position of the writer or the looker.  Boilly in particular was fascinated by the interplay between the naturalness of genre and the facingness of portraiture.  He often showed genre figures looking out at the viewer, as in his painting of the Young Woman Ironing (Fig. 21).  Her interception of the viewer’s gaze departs from the convention for this type of subject.  The kitchen maids and servants, mothers and nursemaids that Chardin and Greuze popularised in France, such as Greuze’s La Parasseuse (Fig. 22), are almost invariably shown deeply absorbed in their work or their reveries, like their prototypes in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. They are prime examples of what Michael Fried called the “absorptive mode of painting.”[36]  The arresting thing about Boilly’s women is that so many of them look out of the picture, no matter what type of character they are – a mother letting her son powder her face, kitchen maids of all kinds, women reading in the landscape or pulling up their stockings. These situations carry muted erotic suggestions and the women themselves are presented to us as objects of visual delectation, so their solicitation of the gaze enacts an aesthetics of seduction.[37]  This female gesture of looking out of the picture did not need popular literature or theatre to justify the familiarity of its address to the viewer, as Greuze did in his exceptional painting of The Laundress (1761; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles).[38]  In Boilly’s work by contrast, the look out, which is consistent and repeated, points to purely visual conditions of specularity as a thematic in art that belonged a late Enlightenment social formation. 

Some of Boilly’s paintings comment on specularity as a signifying regime.  He equated this with women through objects placed near them in his paintings:  a telescope, a spy-glass, and a lorgnette surround one woman seated on a window sill (Fig. 23); another stands holding a guitar with a magic lantern placed conspicuously next to her (Fig. 23b). These instruments make visuality the sign of the feminine.  The women depicted become that sign, presenting themselves to be looked at and signalling an awareness of their objectification by looking back, without doing much else. The young woman in Girl at a Window (Fig. 23) makes no use of the optical instruments around her, exercises no control over her vision even though she holds a lorgnette, but merely turns to look at us.  She is on the one hand a beautiful, captive creature of visuality, like the goldfish in the bowl beside her; on the other hand, she draws us into her realm by intercepting our gaze, making us wonder who she is and why she is there, with her hat on, next to a boy.  In the participatory mode of genre painting a social identity has been proposed for her – she was once called The Optician’s Wife – but this attempt to secure a normative marital status for her, and to explain away her proximity to all those viewing devices, is extremely unstable and says as much about the mischief suggested by her looking and her potential to look in mechanically focussed ways.[39]   

The portrait-motif in genre paintings

The paintings I have been discussing could be said to perform an aesthetics of seduction through female figures who look out.  A number of genre paintings thematise the gendered nature of this encounter with art by depicting scenes in which the portrait of a woman functions as a narrative device.  One of the most interesting is Boilly’s Woman Showing her Portrait (Fig. 24).  The scene shows a woman displaying a portrait of herself to an assembled company.  She is twice represented as the object of our gaze, as an actor in the scene and as her likeness in an oval painted portrait.  The collective appreciation of the woman-as-art is enacted by a gentleman who peers at her up close with a pince-nez or a magnifying glass, squinting in an unattractive way that makes him less like a lover than a connoisseur.  For him the portrait is merely a pretext for connois­seur­ship of the real beauty, and her décolleté, which is repeated in the portrait, suggests where his scrutiny might lead. 

This seems to conform straightforwardly enough to a conventionally gendered representation of woman as the object of the (male) gaze. Yet unusually Boilly’s painting puts the woman in charge of her image, for she is the one who stages its presentation to her intimate circle.  The fact that she holds and points to her portrait is significant since women were rarely shown handling works of art, especially ones of any size.  In Gersaint’s Shopsign by Watteau (1721; Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg, Potsdam), women are among those who look but men handle the paintings on display, a sign of their economic and symbolic control over pictorial representa­tion.  Even female patrons who actively intervened in commissioning art, such as Madame Geoffrin, were not pictured handling it but, in Hubert Robert’s painting of himself presenting a portrait to her, commenting on it from a distance (Private collection).[40]  Rosalie Duthé’s portrait by Danloux (Fig. 15) seems odd precisely because of her curiously self-assertive gesture of hanging of a painting in her boudoir.  

The self-referential nature of the representation in Boilly’s painting of the woman showing a portrait of herself introduces a comment on the conventions of viewing art and genders those in the masculine – or is it in the feminine, or both?  The woman actually addresses herself and her portrait-double to the old woman and the child, leaving the men in the room on the periphery of her self-display.  We might compare this to Michel Garnier’s In the Artist’s Studio (1792-95; Musée d’Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne), where a woman posing for an artist twists around to look adoringly at her patron/lover – he indeed is more the center of attention than she, the ostensible subject of art.  Boilly’s painting opens up possibilities for reading, if not exactly agency in the woman’s role, a shuttling between masculine and feminine subject positions that is not stably anchored in the masculine. This attention to the woman’s place within a regime of visuality demonstrates a high degree of consciousness about the gendered conventions for viewing art.

The emphasis on woman and image in Boilly’s Woman Showing her Portrait bears some relation to iconographies of “Youth” from painting cycles of The Four Ages of Man.  Two such cycles of four paintings each were executed by Nicholas Lancret (1735; National Gallery, London) and Michel-François Dandré-Bardon (1743; Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence).  In both the subject of Youth is interpreted as a time of romance, represented by a woman who exercises control over the visual image.  In Dandré-Bardon’s Youth, a woman holds a portrait miniature, which presumably represents her lover, and taunts him with it as she prepares to ascend the stairs, to the alarm of her kneeling lover, who is simultaneously set upon by his creditors.  That, at least, is how the scene was interpreted by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in verses composed to accompany engravings of the paintings published in 1744.  On this scene Rousseau wrote:  

L’ardente et fougueuse jeunesse
Le met encore en pire état.
Des créanciers, une maîtresse
Le tourmentent comme un forçat[41] 

Genre paintings are usually more ambiguous than the captions in reproductive engravings of them allow, and in this case the woman could be a mother, pointing imperiously upwards and threatening to take the lover’s portrait to a daughter waiting upstairs.  Whoever she is, this female character controls the portrait-image and its viewing, to the distress of the male lover.  In Lancret’s version of Youth, a young woman who has adorned herself with flowers gazes at her reflection in a mirror. The mirror is held up for her by a kneeling man, decked out in red and ribbons, who strikes a pose of worshipful adoration at the edge of her circle of female admirers. All eyes are on her, including her own, but a gentleman at her side turns away from her to address a seated woman who provocatively adjusts her stocking.  The implication of the division between them seems to be that the woman infatuated with her own image risks loosing a man’s attention, for the splendidly-dressed pair in the center of the scene are proposed as a couple even as their actions pull them apart.  Female narcissicism, in other words, threatened the youthful male ego.  Beauty’s imperious and self-satisfied hold on the image of love does not last long, however, since Youth is presented as only one stage in the cycle of life and will pass. 

Boilly’s Woman Showing her Portrait has been related to this symbolic tradition through a suggestion that it represents The Four Ages of Life.[42]  Instead of being one scene from a sequence of canvases, however, the subject is, in this interpretation,  depicted in a single scene which represents the different ages of man through the different characters. This proposal is based on an identification of Woman Showing her Portrait with a title in an inventory of Boilly paintings that were owned by a collector in Avignon, Calvet de Lapalun, specifically a long-lost picture entitled The Four Ages of Life, or the Moralist (Les quatre âges de la vie, ou le moraliste). This title figured as no. 3 in Calvet de Lapalun’s inventory of eleven Boilly paintings that he acquired through gifts or commissions between 1789 and 1792.  The title is dated 1790, although a description of the scene, given for other subjects, is unfortunately lacking.[43]  If the identification is correct—and there is much to support it, though problems remain--the ephemeral nature of beauty would be accentuated by the other characters -- the old woman and child, for instance, would represent the extremes of childhood and old age.  It is less clear which of the remaining three characters (or four, including the subject of the portrait) represent youth and maturity, however; the moralist of the title would presumably be identified with the gentleman given the masculine designation of that variably-gendered noun.[44]  Consistent with thematising the woman as an object of connoisseurship, then, Boilly’s painting may have been delivered to the scrutiny and collection of a self-styled connoisseur, Calvet de Lapalun, who was building up his art collection under the tutelage of the Marquis de Villefranche, an aristocratic client from Avignon who resided in Paris.  

The painting’s relation to other works in Calvet de Lapalun’s collection that also represent women and portraits suggests a reading somewhat at odds with the moralizing overtones of the Four Ages of Man.  Woman Showing her Portrait is thematically linked to two other paintings, entitled The Visit Returned (1789; Fig. 27) and The Sorrows of Love (1790; Fig. 28), that figured as nos. 2 and 4, respectively, in the collector’s inventory of his Boilly paintings.[45]  In The Visit Returned (Fig. 27), a lady effectively brings her portrait to life when she pays an unexpected visit to her lover and finds him writing to her under the inspiration of her painted likeness. The Sorrows of Love (Fig. 28) spells out the consequences of failing the test of beauty when a gentleman’s servant returns a lady’s portrait, signalling the end of the affair.  The portrait travels between lovers as a vehicle of communication, rather like the billet doux of the period, although the image made claims to being a surrogate presence.  This is especially true of portraits of women, which are physically larger objects, like the bust-length oval canvases depicted in these paintings, than the miniatures of men that were often represented in genre scenes of the time.[46]   The portrait has a common role in these three paintings, as a barometer of romance, but the same object is not depicted in all of them:  the oval portraits were adjusted to match the lady’s different costumes and orientations in each scene, as if the work of art responded materially to her presence in the room.   Boilly, who was an accomplished portraitist, often accorded portraits a narrative role in his galant scenes:  delivered, returned, admired, hidden and crushed, they suffer virtually the travails of his characters. 

If these three paintings could be said to form a narrative sequence, the typological relation of the subjects to each other was not firmly established by convention like those in the temporal cycles were, such as the ages of man, the times of days, and the seasons of the year, which dated from the middle ages. The gallant subjects of Boilly’s paintings were invented on an ad hoc basis, in response to patronage conditions of the time.  For example these three paintings relate to a fourth by Boilly in the same collection, the first one the collector acquired.  The Visit Received (1789; Fig. 29) was no. 1 in Calvet de Lapalun’s inventory of Boilly paintings and differs from inventory nos. 2, 3, and 4 in several respects. The Visit Received represents a woman looking over her shoulder into a darkened room as she passes a letter to a messenger boy at the door. The letter, rather than the painted portrait, functions as the conventional token of romantic intrigue.  There is an oval canvas in the scene, propped up on the floor behind the woman with its face turned to the wall – merely a prop rather than a narrative device. It is as if the oval canvas had been picked up and turned around, activated as a protagonist in the story of the woman’s liaisons that is related in the next three paintings.  This difference in conception corresponds to a difference of authorship. The first subject of The Visit Received was invented by Boilly and purchased by the Marquis de Villefranche as a gift for his friend, whereas the next three subjects were invented by the Marquis de Villefranche for his friend.  The similar formats of the paintings and their common focus on a woman as the central figure of romantic intrigue relate them loosely to each other as a group. The significant point is the looseness and flexibility of the grouping. Variable interpretations and arrangements of the paintings were facilitated by their mix-and-match subjects, depending on whether they were sub-divided into pendants or a trio and individual painting or augmented by other scenes.  This kind of flexibility was a sign of the unpredictability of a commercialised market for art, which in this case involved a combination of purchasing ready-made pictures and commissioning particular subjects through negotiations between a collector, his advisor, and an artist. 

A distinctive treatment of the portrait-motif as a narrative device emerges from this group of pictures by Boilly in Calvet de Lapalun’s collection. The four paintings trace a shift from the billet doux to the portrait as the token of the lover in gallant scenes from the end of the eighteenth century. This shift from the written word to the visual image as the sign of the lover, and its identification with the female subject, was symptomatic of late Enlightenment conditions of specularity that marked out women and art as mutually reinforcing terms.  The theme of the woman and her portrait, or of the woman as her portrait, was relatively new.  The mirroring or shadowing of the woman by her portrait seems to comment self-consciously on the gendered conditions for viewing art, in which the female figure was so identified with art that there could seem to be no art without women – something that neoclassical history painting and the contemporary history painting emerging from the Revolution was meanwhile challenging.     

The artist as woman

Like Woman Showing her Portrait (Fig. 24), The Painter in her Studio (Fig. 30) dramatizes the relationship between the model and the model’s portrait, between the subject and the object of representation.  Both paintings pose an analogy between the absorptive fiction of the scene and our activity of looking at it.  This is particularly complicated in the Painter in her Studio by the framing of the artist against a light rectangle behind her, which the studio setting suggests be understood as a blank canvas.  The juxtaposition of the woman against the light rectangle turns her into a portrait, seen in profile from our perspective, just as the artist and her young female companion look at the little boy in profile, his head turned sideways towards us, framed against a canvas resting behind him on an easel. The triangulation of these glances–they look at him, he looks at us, we look at them--brings the viewer actively into the scene and makes us aware of its play with conventions of representation.  There are still more sleights of hand.  The disposition of the actors in the scene is echoed by the sculpted busts perched on the cupboard above them, where an antique male head is seen in profile, looking gravely ahead, like the artist at work, while the cherubic face of a child’s bust turns toward the front, as the artist’s model turns to face us. Behind the artist’s sketching board, in front of the background “canvas,” is another rectangle, framed in wood and raised at an angle, that appears to be the screen of an optical diagonal machine (a Zograscope), as if to suggest that the illusionistic tricks of two-dimensional representation can be created at will.   

It is of central interest that Boilly chose to represent the artist as a woman seriously engaged in her work, which consists of making a portrait, at the moment he did.  As I have discussed elsewhere, he exhibited this painting at the Salon of 1796, one of the first held after the Revolution when the restrictions previously imposed on non-Academic artists such as himself had been removed.[47]  The immediate result of this liberalization of the right to exhibit was an influx of genre painters and women artists.  Boilly’s choice of this subject indicates his sympathy with the situation of women artists at this moment, which was very like his own.  Might we regard the painting as a figurative self-portrait, in which he toyed with the idea of being a fe-male and considered what it would be like to be a woman artist who draws a portrait?  His inscription of himself in the scene is suggested by his use of a study of one of his sons for the boy model (Fig. 31), and by the visual association he drew between the woman artist and antique male head above her.  Drawing was a perfectly cross-gendered practice to represent in this respect:  it was theoretically the male art (le dessin), the medium of invention and idea, while being at the same time an accomplishment, a polite social art appropriate for amateurs and women, just as making portraits, especially portraits of children, was deemed suitable for women artists. 

The Painter in her Studio (Fig. 30), Woman Showing her Portrait (Fig. 24), and other paintings such as Trinquesse’s The Music Party (Fig. 4) indicate a multiplication of possibilities for interpretation and social interaction with the work. If the activity of the artist is gendered in the feminine in Boilly’s scene, then “she” plays upon her engendering of art and her generation in art.  “She” displays the gender of genre as a teasingly uncertain thing, given to playfully exposing mimesis as really just a game, more of a seduction than (as Pliny would have it) a competitive deception of one male artist by another.  The child in Boilly’s painting of the Studio who solicits our gaze is all innocence, yet the fetching way he looks at us recalls the mediating looks of the female figures who look out of so many of the artist’s genre paintings.  The boy’s innocence contrasts with a knowledge of the painting’s seduction that seeps into our consciousness as we look at the two women, who are both purposefully looking and yet in doing so are framed for us as beautiful objects of display.  We remark their differences—blond and brunette, young and mature, colored garments and white—as a connoisseur might, and circle back to the woman in white, flooded in light, solemn and buxom in her ruffled muslin dress, who dominates the center the painting.  How innocent is our viewing of this beauty, this art? 

The unsayable of gender    

The power of genre painting lay in its semiotic fluidity.  The forms this took at the end of the eighteenth century depended on semi-public, semi-private spaces for sociability and viewing art.  Most of the paintings discussed in this essay were products of those social milieus.  The works Boilly produced, for example, which were small and intimate, date from the years when he was excluded from the public Salon exhibitions and showed instead at alternative venues and sold privately to collectors.  The thematics of specularity taken up in these and other paintings admit to a consciousness of looking and being looked at that belonged to a late Enlightenment social formation of the 1780s, 1790s, and early years of the nineteenth century.  Women held a prominent and visible place in these semi-public private realms as the managers of their sociability.  Aspects of the salonnière culture could be said to have been continued, with important modifications, after the Revolution by women such as Joséphine de Beauharnais and Juliette Récamier.[48]  Although women loomed large in the imaginary of this period, their social and legal situation was changed by restrictions imposed on their activities and rights.  The Salon exhibitions changed character as well, as they had been doing all along.  The clubby atmosphere of the early eighteenth-century Academy Salons gave way in the 1780s to larger, more anonymous exhibitions and changed again in the 1790s, when the doors were opened to all exhibitors.  After that the numbers climbed steadily as it became a monstrously dominant institution, with thousands of exhibits, dozens of galleries, and attendance conceived in terms of crowds rather than publics. The paintings Boilly made for these exhibitions looked different than the ones he had made before, and represented and enacted the thematics of specularity differently as well.  Paintings made in the eighteenth century by artists such as Boilly, Trinquesse, and Longhi looked forward to the nineteenth-century in their tendency to equate art with the figure of the woman and above all in their conscious play with the gendered conventions for viewing art.  There was some pick-up on these developments in the early decades of the nineteenth century but on the whole they were overwhelmed by a reinstatement of the hierarchy of genres that took place under Napoleon, following a reconfiguration of the hierarchy to incorporate the representation of contemporary events. 

One might speculate that the free interplay between the genres in eighteenth-century France, and the delight taken in subverting their categorisation, was enabled by the assumed stability of the larger social and political order.  This vanished with the French Revolution, which catapulted art production and patronage into a state of uncertainty and flux.  The new and persistent demand for representations of contemporary political and military history dragged subjects up from the bottom of the heap that were widely regarded as “mere” genre.  The earliest scenes of Revolutionary history were produced by genre painters, many of them previously marginalized and excluded from the Académie royale des beaux-arts, such as J. Berthaud (The Day of 10 August 1792, 1793, Musée national du Château, Versailles), Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (The Taking of a Village, Salon of 1793, Nice, Prefecture; Bonaparte receiving prisoners on the battlefield of Marengo, Salon of 1801, Musée national du Château, Versailles); and Jacques Sablet (Le dix-huit Brumaire, c. 1800, Musée des beaux-arts, Nantes).  It was a direct result of the government’s push for contemporary military history that Taunay was one of two genre painters, of only six painters total, named to the Classe des beaux-arts when the Institut de France was formed in 1795.  Portraiture was heavily implicated in this Revolutionary shake-up of the genres, whether one is talking about a portrait-cum-genre such as Boilly’s The actor Chenard in the costume of a sans-culotte at the Festival of Liberty in the Savoy, 14 October 1792 (1793-94, Musée Carnavalet, Paris) or a portrait-cum-history painting such as Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s The Death of General Desaix (1801, Musée national du Château, Versailles).  But the real pressure was brought to bear on history painting, the only category that had ever really mattered as far as policing boundaries was concerned. 

These new ambiguities of definition and status persisted through the fiasco of the Prix Decennaux, when the jury stalemated over Napoleon’s attempt to redefine history painting to include contemporary political and military subjects.  By the 1820s the whole romantic reaction against the eighteenth-century preoccupation with categories and conventions set in.  If one looks to this sort of genre hybridism happening again, it is not until the later nineteenth century, in works such as Édouard Manet’s Woman with a Parrot (1866; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Claude Monet’s Camille [The Green Dress] (1866; Bremen, Kunsthalle), that genre categories were so self-consciously played off against each other. The crucial difference was that in the 1860s, crossing portraiture and genre was an oppositional strategy and carried a burden of resistance that was thoroughly informed by a context of public exhibition.[49]  Such hybridity was seen, and surely conceived at the time, as disruptive and dissonant compared with the pleasurable syntheses and playful oscillations between genre and portraiture that were sought in the eighteenth century. 

If we consider genre painting as “the unsayable of a generic system” of art, as suggested at the beginning of this essay, how does gender fit into this?  What is “unsayable” about many of the works I have discussed is the dominate role played by the image of woman in the experience of the painting.  Because this female mediation of art took place in a realm of practice that was not regarded as serious, since it lay within genre painting’s rag-bag of social transactions and interactions, not too much hinged on the representation of female figures as vehicles of that experience. Once modernity and history painting were brought together on the same level of practice after the mid-nineteenth century, however, genre painting, and with it the image of woman, began to work in a different way. Genre painting effectively lost its purchase as a category by the 1870s because history painting took over its representation of everyday social scenes and thus ceased to be a marker of the highest level of artistic performance.  

Notes