Images de l’oubli de soi: les scènes de genre de Greuze et de Chardin
Images of forgetting oneself: genre scenes of Greuze and Chardin

Summary/Abstract: Genre painting, also called genre scene or “petit genre”, represents aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) and JeanSiméon Chardin (1699–1779) are probably the most famous painters specialized in this genre in the eighteenth century in France. It is striking that often the characters in their canvases are deeply absorbed in ordinary activities, forgetting the surrounding world. The purpose of our paper is to illustrate the representations of self-effacement in French painting of the eighteenth century, based on the analysis of some paintings by Greuze and Chardin and also on theoretical and critical texts of their time. We draw as well a parallel between the work of Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, and the theory of the flow of the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, to show their common points considering always their appearances in the genre paintings.

• Details
• Contents