Genre. The word genre adapted to the art of Painting, serves properly to distinguish from the class of history painters, those who, limited to certain subjects, undertake specialized study in painting them; and a sort of law only to represent them: thus, the artist who chooses only animals, fruit, flowers, or landscapes as the subject of his paintings is called a genre painter . Furthermore, this forced or well-considered modesty which engages an artist to limit himself to the imitation of the subjects which please him most, or to the representation of which he finds that he has the most facility, is only too laudable and the result is much more advantageous to art than the presumption and doggedness that make those whose talents are too limited to fulfill all the demands of history painting to undertake it. There is thus no reason to give less consideration to an able genre painter because his talents remain within a sphere that seems more limited; as it is not for a painter a just source of pride that he paints poorly in all genres . In order to destroy these two prejudices, one must consider that the painter whose genre seems limited, still has however such a lot of research and studies to do, care and trouble to take in order to succeed; [and] that the field he cultivates is vast enough for him to be able to draw satisfying fruit from his labors. Moreover, the genre painter, from the habitual consideration of the same subjects, always renders them with a truthfulness of imitation of the forms which gives a true merit to his works. From another perspective, the history painter deals with so many subjects that it is very easy to prove, by both logic and experience, that there are many of them of which he presents only very imperfect imitations: moreover, the mediocre history painter is, to enlightened eyes, so little worthy of esteem in his productions; these beings that he produces (and in the existence of which he exults), are phantoms so counterfeit in their form, so little natural in their color, so gauche or so false in their expression, that far from deserving the least admiration, they ought to be suppressed like the children that the Lacedaemonians [Spartans] condemned to death because their physical defects rendered them useless to the republic, and because simply looking at them could cause monstrous births.

It is thus in accord with reason that I encourage Artists who have some basis for doubting their abilities, or to whom attempts that are too painful and achieve little success, demonstrate the futility of their efforts, to limit themselves in their labors, in order to fulfill with at least some utility a career that in this way will become worthy of praise. For, it is impossible to repeat too often today: every man who allows the exercise of his talents to be directed by his fantasy, by fashion, or by bad taste, is a not only a useless citizen, but indeed one who is very harmful to society. By contrast, he who sacrifices the blind desires of pretention, or the seduction of example, to the honest goal of acquitting himself well of a mediocre talent, is worthy of praise for the utility it procures, and for the sacrifice he makes of his pride [ amour propre ]. But it is not enough for me to have supported by what I have just said, the rights of taste and reason; I would like in comparing the principal genres of the work of Painting, with the different genres that distinguish the inventions of Poetry, to give the public [ gens du monde ] a more noble idea than they usually have of the artists we call genre painters , and to these artists a sense of pride [ amour propre ] based on the similarity of the operations of the two arts, whose principles are equally drawn from nature, and whose glory is equally based on truthful [ juste ] imitation. I have said under the term Gallery, that a large series of paintings in which the same history is represented at different moments, corresponds in painting to the inventions of Poetry, which are composed of several cantos, such as the great poems, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Jerusalem Delivered, Paradise Lost, and the Henriade. [1] As it would also be quite possible that three or five paintings designed to decorate a salon would have among them a connection and a gradation of interest, one could follow in the way they were treated, some of the principles that constitute tragedy or comedy; there are an infinite number of such subjects appropriate to Painting that would easily furnish three or five agreeable, interesting, and touching situations. This unity of action would stimulate a sustained curiosity that would turn to the advantage of an able artist, who, in order better to stimulate it, would reserve for the final tableau the touching catastrophe or the pleasing denouement of the action. The series composed for the great tapestries present a part of this idea, but often we do not see in them enough of the progression of interest upon which I insist; they are too vulnerable to choosing only that which will seem more opulent, and which will furnish more subjects, without reflecting that the scenes when the stage is fullest are not always those from which the spectator derives the most pleasure. I would also add that these types of dramatic, picturesque poems should always be chosen to meet the demands of the spaces for which they are destined; there are so many well-known events, stories, and fables of different characters, that each apartment could be decorated in the genre which best agrees with its use, and this type of agreement and unity could not fail to produce a more pleasing spectacle than these common assortments, which having no connection either among the subjects or in the manner of treating them, offer in the same place the austere beauties of history jumbled in with the marvels of fable and the reveries of an undisciplined imagination; but let us go on to other genres . The heroic pastoral is a genre common to Poetry and Painting, which is no more sworn to nature in one art than the other. In fact, to describe a shepherd with effeminate morals, to give him feelings that are hardly natural, or to paint him in clothes bedecked with ribbons, in studied poses, is to commit without question two equally grave faults of verisimilitude; and these productions of the art which owes so little to nature, have need of an extreme artfulness in order to be tolerated. The natural pastoral, that genre in which Theocritus and Poussin were successful,  [2] holds closer to the truth; it also lends more real resources to Painting. Nature, fecund and inexhaustible in its fecundity, avenges itself for the affront it suffers from the sectarians of the previous genre , by bestowing on the painter and the poet who wish to follow it, a bottomless source of riches and beauties. The idyll, like the landscape, is a genre that means a lot to the person of whom we have just spoken ( Poussin ). An artist represents a charming landscape, we see there a tomb; near this monument a young man and a young girl have stopped and are reading the inscription before them, and that inscription says to them: I lived like you in delicious Arcadia ; doesn’t it seem to the person who sees this painting, that he reads the idyll of the stream of the naïve Deshoulières? [3] In both of these productions the pleasing images of nature lead to thoughts as true and as philosophical as the manner in which they are presented is pleasing and true. The word portrait is common to both Poetry and Painting; these two genres are comparable in these two arts down to the manner in which they are treated; because very few resemble [their subjects]. The verse descriptions of the gifts of nature are to Poetry what the works in which Desportes and Baptiste represented flowers and fruits so well have been to Painting: [4] animal painters are associated with fabulists; finally, even satire and epigrams can be treated by both Painting and Poetry; but these two talents, which are not only useless but harmful, are consequently too little worthy of respect for me to linger on them. I will not go further with this list, which those whom it pleases can extend as their imagination and knowledge fancy. I would add only that in Painting the genres are broken down into divisions and can be subdivided endlessly: landscape has produced painters of factories, of architecture, those of animals, of seascapes; nothing short of views of a church interior has occupied the talents of the Pieter-nefs and Stenwits. [5]

1. That is, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey , Virgil’s Aeneid , and the neoclassical poems Jerusalem Delivered (1581) by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso, Paradise Lost (1667) by the English poet John Milton, and Voltaire’s epic poem about the French King Henri IV, La Henriade (1723).

2. The references are to the Greek poet Theocritus (c. 300 BCE – c. 260 BCE) and the French painter Nicolas Poussin (154-1665).

3. The painting to which Watelet refers is Les Bergers d’Arcadie (The Arcadian Shepherds), also known as Et in Arcadia Ego [I was an Arcadian too], painted by Poussin between 1638 and 1640 and now held in the Louvre. The scene first appeared in the Idylls of Theocritus and was later reworked by Virgil in the Eclogues and became a topos of the Italian Renaissance. See “Et in Arcadia ego.” The poet to whom Watelet refers, however, is not Theocritus, but Antoinette Deshoulières (1634-1694), known as Madame Deshoulières (to distinguish her from her poet daughter), and author of “Le Ruisseau. Idylle,” [The stream. An Idyll]. It can be found in Poësies de madame Deshoulieres, 2 vols. (Paris, 1724-25), 1: 130-34.

4. The first reference is to Alexandre-François Desportes (1661-1743), who painted still lives and hunting scenes and was especially known for his paintings of animals, including portraits of the dogs of Louis XIV and Louis XV. The second reference is less clear. A French flower painter of birds and flowers named Baptiste shows up in Artnet, but with no further details.

5. There were two Flemish painters of church interiors called Pieter Neefs, father and son: Pieter Neefs the Elder (1578- c.1656/1661) and Pieter Neefs the Younger (1620-1675). Watelet’s other reference is to another father and son pair of Dutch painters of church interiors: Hendrik van Steenwijk I (c. 1550-?), the first known painter in this genre; and Hendrik van Steenwijk II (c. 1580-1640), who was born in Antwerp. Susanna van Steenwijk (after 1601-1664), the wife of the younger van Steenwijk, also painted in the genre.