Art Last Impression
In the nineteenth century, the portrait form explored and celebrated the individual by
isolating a person on the canvas, the artist recognized him as a subject with a character and
will of his own. Genre, on the other hand, was the painting of social scene, a sketch of the
modern metropolis, where characters represent static social ‘types’, rather than unique
personalities. Tamar Garr’s lecture gave a fascinating account of how the Impressionist
artists used portraiture and genre to construct and comment on the process of constructing
individual identity in relation to social expectations.
In the nineteenth century, it was widely held amongst the artistic community, that only
certain individuals could be painted in portrait – namely, bourgeois, artistic or aristocratic
men – as only they could be understood as dynamic ‘subjects’ with a sense of their own
unique identity. Consider Pissaro’s portrait of Cezanne, a rustic character built up through
minor detail (the fragment of a radical newspaper in the background, the torn peasant
clothes, the size of Cezanne’s body overpowering the canvas). Or portraits of bourgeois
factory owners, dressed in expensive suits and assertively facing the viewer head on. These
are representations of men able to act and think independently. In comparison are the
fragments of social scenes typified in Manet’s ‘Music Hall’ (1862) or ‘The Tuilleries’
(1873-4) where characters fit within a wider social panorama, not examined as individuals
in their own right.
Of course, such distinctions between individuals and social types were closely related to
gender and the representation of women. At the risk of reciting a clich, women were
