GENRE, as applied to paintings, has primarily to do with a type of subject, but the proper application of the term is limited also by the painter's attitude toward the subject. In genre paint ing the artist deals with intimate scenes and subjects from ordi nary daily life. The elimination of imaginative content serves to focus attention upon the shrewd observation of types, costumes and settings and upon the beauty and appropriateness of colour, form and texture. True genre painting should reduce to a mini mum such subjective qualities as the dramatic, historical, cere monial, satirical, didactic, romantic, sentimental and religious. Characteristic works by Steen, Daumier, Rowlandson and Hogarth would thus be too satirical or didactic to qualify perfectly as genre, while those of Wheatley, Morland and Fragonard would be too sentimental and those of J. F. Millet too romantic.
In Europe, genre painting scarcely deserves serious notice until the late middle ages when we often find in manuscript books illu minated calendars showing the occupations appropriate to the months or seasons. (See ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS.) These little genre pictures give intimate glimpses of the life of the time. Soon the taste for genre becomes so keen that Petrus Cristus, Pieter Aertsen and Pieter Bruegel paint scenes in shops and kitchens thinly disguised as religious subjects. This practice was followed later by Rembrandt, supreme in his ability to express profound emotion without surrendering the objective attitude. The greatest home of genre painting was indeed Holland in Rem brandt's time when flourished Adriaen van Ostade, Gerard Dou, Gabriel Metsu, Jan Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch and Terborch. Among later exponents are Jean Simeon Chardin in France and Pietro Longhi in Italy.