Paintings of the British Social Scene, from Hogarth to Sickert

The genre of paintings known, unhappily, as 'genre' constitutes a kind of middle-ground in the study of English painting, drawing selectively on such adjacent territories as portraiture and landscape, but seldom amenable to adequate definition. Hence the diversity of labels carried by all or part of the field over the years – conversation pieces, modern moral subjects, domestic pictures, fancy pictures, incidents, problem pictures, narrative paintings. Professor Johnson's attempt at descriptive definition, in the title of the present book, is more awkward and misleading than most, suggesting as it does the annexation of genre paintings as documentary illustrations for social-historical conclusions.