genre

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. In the visual arts, genre refers to paintings that depict common incidents in the lives of ordinary people.

Literary genres
In literature, genres are used to classify texts, which obey common conventions in their structure, content, or style. In its broadest sense, it can be used to divide literature into poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction writing. Genre can describe structures (such as sonnet and limerick), content (such as science fiction and Western), styles (such as lyric and narrative), purpose (such as elegy and sermon), and source (such as folktale).

Artistic genres
Genre 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 Adriaen Brouwer. Peasant life is also represented in 17th-century France by the brothers Le Nain.

The Netherlands provides a wealth of genre pictures of burgher (town) life in the works of Jan Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, Gerard Terborch, Jan Steen, and others. Jean-Baptiste Chardin presents Parisian middle-class life in the 18th century; William Hogarth extends genre into a cross-section of society, morally analysed. Various categories are found in English art: rustic, anecdotal and humorous, and animal. Paintings of Parisian life by Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, and Edgar Degas demonstrate that genre is not necessarily inferior in beauty or quality to pictures with more elevated subject matter.