Intimate Encounters

Exploring genre painting within the broad cultural context of Enlightenment France, this book deals with aspects of art, gender and politics in the decades preceding the French Revolution, to argue that the paintings bear the intellectual imprint of turbulent times. The book presents over 75 genre paintings and prints that depict the interactions of "ordinary" people - non-historical, non-mythic figures - within the family and in romantic encounters. It shows how genre painters tended to infuse their depictions of intimacy with moral and ideological significance. Their imagery coincided with fundamental debates over gender roles and relationships, the family, child-rearing, and illicit versus conjugal love, topics that were crucial to such writers and social commentators as Rosseau, Diderot and Laclos. The five essays included in this volume discuss such matters as: art criticism and the presence of women in cultural life; the family and the ideology of sentimentalism; the influence of innovative theatre on genre painting; the debate over women's rights; and the production and marketing of prints to a growing art audience.