Introduction

Abstract

In the virtual museum of the visual arts, the gallery displaying English painting of the nineteenth century is dominated by genre painting: depictions of ordinary people—les gens—primarily in domestic settings. The hearth is the dominant setting in which comfortable scenes of parents and children are presented. More explicitly than in works of previous times, these visual depictions convey stories; their generous details and structures evoke readings, typically moralistic ones. Within the gallery there is a clear progression, not only in depictive techniques, but in effects: the later paintings increasingly elicit feelings of protest, rather than a celebration of order. Moving from that gallery into the one displaying modernist works, the diminishment of representation is shocking, and the celebration of color and more abstract form is exciting; but it is the absence of narrative that is most unnerving. The domestic themes that were so comfortable to regard or, later, so immediately challenging to consider, accompanied by their richly detailed depictions of home life, have disappeared. One is disoriented, because the art is no longer familiar in several senses of the word.