Genre Painting and Portraiture: On the Boundary Between Genres

Abstract

The article highlights a trend in Russian and Western painting concerning the boundaries between genre and portraiture. In the article the author refers to such pieces of art as a mixed ‘everyday genre with portraiture’, though some other definitions are also taken into account. The article contains a historical survey of this mixed genre encompassing times from the Late Middle Ages to the 19th century. The author focuses on the 19th century realism as a sum of the earlier European pictorial art manifesting to be the Protorealistic tendency. A special subject matter of the article is the psychological and social identity of the depicted characters. Another issue discussed is a fate of the ‘everyday genre with portraiture’ mix in the context of the terminal stage of the academic genre system and the widening stylistic range in the 19th-century fine art.

Keywords

• genre painting
• portrait painting
• modern art
• realism
• sociology of art
• psychology of art