Louvre Museum: Genre Paintings: Scenes from Daily Life

From February to June 2015, the National Art Center, Tokyo presented “Louvre Museum: Genre Paintings: Scenes from Daily Life,” a survey exhibition drawn from the Louvre’s permanent collection tracing the development of genre painting across four centuries, from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century. The show brought together 83 works depicting ordinary people engaged in the activities of everyday life, placing Dutch and Flemish masters alongside Italian, Spanish, and French painters to chart how this category of subject matter rose from a subordinate position in academic hierarchies to become one of the most celebrated modes of European painting.

The selection ranged widely in period and nationality, encompassing works by Rembrandt, Murillo, Watteau, Chardin, Greuze, Millet, and Delacroix, among others. Highlights included Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s “The Broken Pitcher,“ Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot’s ”The Studio of Corot,“ and Martin Drolling’s ”Interior of a Kitchen.“ Together these pictures illustrated the genre’s persistent themes: domestic interiors, labour, childhood, music-making, and the pleasures and textures of private life.

Vermeer’s “The Astronomer” (1668), normally on permanent display in Paris, travelled to Japan for the first time for this exhibition. The painting depicts a scholar in a candlelit interior reaching toward a celestial globe, and it stands as one of the few signed and dated works in Vermeer’s small oeuvre. Its inclusion anchored the Dutch Golden Age section of the exhibition and offered Japanese audiences a rare opportunity to see the picture outside the Louvre. The Louvre has held “The Astronomer” since 1983, when it was accepted in lieu of inheritance taxes following the death of its previous owner, the Rothschild family having acquired it in the nineteenth century.