Irony and Civility: Notes on the Convergence of Genre and Portraiture in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting

Abstract

A basic, but little discussed, feature of later seventeenth-century Dutch naturalism is the convergence of genre painting and portraiture in their shared preoccupation with the setting and the social milieu of upper-middle-class domestic life. Of particular interest are genre scenes that mimic the conventions of portraiture. Such works not only demonstrate the sensitivity of Dutch artists to the role of generic boundaries in the formal vocabulary of naturalism, but also show an awareness of the degree to which portrait conventions are bound up with social conventions of civility and decorum. For in their hidden symbolism, these genre paintings create ironic inversions of portraiture's social meanings, suggesting that immoral thoughts lie behind the formal façades of the figures represented. Given the implicitly “aesthetic” nature of good social form, this separation between form and content also entails a cleavage between art and reality that has broader implications for the ironic character and elusive meanings of Dutch naturalism in this period.

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Notes on contributors

David R. Smith

David Smith's various publications on Baroque painting often have dealt with problems of portraiture in the Netherlands, including the double portrait, which was the topic of his doctoral dissertion (Columbia, 1978) as well as an earlier article in the Art Bulletin (1982). [Department of the Arts, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824]