Three words help you sort any picture: subject, genre and style. They answer different questions, so keep them apart.
- Subject: what the work shows. A man and his hounds coming home in the snow. A woman pouring milk.
- Genre: the family of subjects it belongs to. The main genres of European painting are history painting (stories from religion, myth, history or literature), portrait, genre scene (everyday life), landscape and still life.
- Style: how it is shown. Flat or deep, smooth or brushy, calm or dramatic. A period style (Gothic, Renaissance) is shared by many artists; a personal style belongs to one.
Key idea
Why it works
Looking closely: Hunters in the Snow. Three hunters and their dogs trudge downhill at the left, past a fire outside an inn. The hill drops away to a wide valley of frozen ponds, where tiny figures skate, and on to jagged mountains. Dark tree trunks and dark figures stand out against white snow and a green-gray sky, and a long diagonal carries your eye from the hunters to the far distance. The subject is a winter day; the genre is landscape with everyday life in it; the style is Bruegel's: crisp outlines, a high viewpoint and a huge, carefully built space.
Vermeer's Milkmaid is a genre scene: a kitchen maid pours milk at a table by a window. You will meet it again in Art History II.
Worked example: Sort one painting
- Subject: a seated woman with folded hands, before a distant landscape.
- Genre: it shows a particular person, so it is a portrait.
- Style: soft, smoky shading without hard outlines (sfumato), typical of Leonardo and the High Renaissance.
Answer: Subject: a seated woman; genre: portrait; style: Leonardo's soft High Renaissance modeling.
Common mistake