Paintings of Everyday Life
Kitchens, cafés, river banks and card tables: ordinary life as the great painters saw it.
13 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
Genre painting
The Dutch invented it: pictures of daily life with no story from scripture or myth behind them, a maid pouring milk, a company of militiamen. The French took it up two centuries later and made it modern. Renoir's friends lunching on a balcony at Chatou, Seurat's Sunday crowd on an island in the Seine, Cézanne's peasants at cards and Manet's barmaid at the Folies-Bergère are the Impressionist era's lasting record of how people lived.
The works in this collection
Vermeer's The Milkmaid; Rembrandt's The Night Watch; Velázquez's Las Meninas; Millet's The Gleaners; Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère; Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party and Bal du moulin de la Galette; Cézanne's The Card Players; Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte; Cassatt's The Child's Bath; Sorolla's children at the beach; Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and El Jaleo.
On the wall
These are sociable paintings and suit the rooms people gather in: the Boating Party and the Grande Jatte above a dining table, The Milkmaid in a kitchen, The Child's Bath in a bathroom or a nursery.