GENRE PAINTING • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Genre painting

... to the genre painting of the Flemish and Dutch artists we find that they represented scenes in the lives of coarse, drunken boors and vulgar women—works which brought these artists enduring fame by reason of their wonderful technique; but we can mention one woman only, Anna Breughel, who seriously attempted the ...

— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... blockheads think themselves painters, and are received by the public as such, if they know how to foreshorten bones and decipher entrails; and men with capacity of art either shrink away (the best of them always do) into petty felicities and innocencies of genre painting—landscapes, cattle, family breakfasts, village schoolings, and the like; or else, if they have the full sensuous art-faculty that would have made true painters of them, being taught from their youth up, to look for and learn the body instead of the spirit, have learned ...

— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton