Scenes of Everyday Life
Ordinary people at work, at leisure and on the street, from painted genre scenes and city scrolls to documentary photography.
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About
Pictures of ordinary people doing ordinary things are known in European art as genre scenes, but the impulse is far older and wider. Zhang Zeduan's handscroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival (early 12th century) follows boatmen, porters, shopkeepers and travellers through a busy Song-dynasty city. In the Dutch Republic Jan Steen painted households in such cheerful disorder that a chaotic home is still called a Jan Steen household in Dutch.
In the 19th century painters looked for modern life in public places. Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86) arranges Parisians relaxing by the Seine in a patient mosaic of dots. The camera made the everyday its natural territory: Helen Levitt photographed children playing in New York streets from the late 1930s, and Robert Frank's book The Americans (1958) drew on road trips across the country to record diners, parades and jukeboxes.
