ETYM French See Gender.
(French) kind; style; realistic painting of everyday scenes.1. A class of artistic endeavor having a characteristic form or technique.
2. A kind of literary or artistic work.
A particular kind of work within an art form, differentiated by its structure, content, or style. For instance, the novel is a literary genre and the historical novel is a genre of the novel. The Western is a genre of film, and the symphonic poem is a musical genre.
It is also a term specifically applied to paintings which depict familiar scenes of everyday life. An early master of genre is Peter Brueghel the Elder; and the peasant life of the Netherlands inspired further examples in the paintings of Teniers and Brouwer. Peasant life is also represented in 17th century France by the brothers Le Nain. The Netherlands provide a wealth of genre pictures of burgher life in the works of Vermeer, de Hooch, Metsu, Ter Borch, Jan Steen, and others. Chardin presents Parisian middle-class life in the 18th century; Hogarth extends genre into a cross-section of society, morally analyzed. Various categories are found in English art; rustic, anecdotal and humorous, and animal. Paintings of Parisian life by Manet, Renoir, and Degas demonstrate that genre is not necessarily inferior in beauty or quality to pictures with more elevated subject matter.