Art: THE GOOD & BAD OLD DAYS

ONE word that trips lightly from the tongues of connoisseurs and often falls flat in company is the term “genre” (rhymes roughly with honor), a harmless, precise and useful term from the French. Webster defines genre art as that “in which subjects of everyday life are treated realistically.” A brilliant exhibition of 37 American genre paintings from 1835 to 1885 is now touring the country under the auspices of the American Federation of Arts. Called “A Hundred Years Ago,” it opens next week in New Britain, Conn.

A minor art form, genre is now largely superseded by photography, a similar and also minor art form. But in the mid-19th century, a host of American journeymen-artists practiced genre painting with extraordinary success. The rising middle class of the period paid well and cheerfully for competent pictures of the things to be seen through their own windows: Drawing a Bead on a Woodchuck, Cornhusking, The German Immigrant Enquiring His Way, The Organ Grinder, The Sailor’s Wedding. All that seems quaint about such pictures helped give them a soothing familiarity in their own time. The passing generations form an outlandish costume parade, and a century hence, Norman Rockwell’s modern genre pictures will also look quaint.

But genre becomes art when the painter touches common scenes with unexpected beauty or significance. David Gilmour Blythe’s Trial Scene goes beyond the quaintness of the once-familiar to touch upon hell. The loutish, evil-looking jurors, the shouting prosecutor and the passive, shackled prisoner in yellow crudely resemble the phantasmagorias of Hieronymous Bosch, but they relate to fact. In Blythe’s time, there was a proto-union of Irish immigrant miners that violently opposed exploitation by American industry. Calling themselves the “Molly Maguires” after the famed Irish rebel,*they operated outside the law, tried and condemned opponents on their own. Blythe, who was obviously no labor sympathizer, records one such drumhead trial. John O’Brien Inman was the son of the prominent portraitist Henry Inman. Oddly enough, he himself never made much of a reputation. But his Moonlight Skating in Central Park is pure champagne: chill, sparkling, heady. And like the others in the exhibition, his picture helps fill in the panoramic sweep of history with specific detail, showing just how things were in a time before the camera became ubiquitous.

*-Molly Maguire was a fierce-tempered Irish widow and patriot who in the 18403 organized gangs in Ireland to oppose the British overlords, beating and murdering landlords and their agents in protest against oppressive rents.