Resumen de Peinture d'histoire et peinture de paysage: un dialogue ininterrompu
According to the traditional hierarchy of the arts, which establishes a scale of values between the major and minor arts, history painting should occupy a superior position in relation to landscape or genre painting. These categories were legitimized in the procedures of recruitment of painters and in their institutional training. It played a role in what was at stake in the art market and formed a sort of grid from which the artists tried to escape. Could any painter turn his back on landscape or be a landscape painter without considering history? The dialogue between the two pictorial genres produced a long standing debate in France between the 18th and 19th centuries. This article attempts to trace several points of reference, drawing on the written sources and examining a wide range of documents. A number of indications of the challenging of the hierarchy of genres can be found in 18th century French art criticism, which, on several occasions raised the following question: is painting subject to a judgment concerning its content or its form? Should one paint for the soul or for the eyes? The paintings of Nicolas Poussin, history painter, as well as a great landscape painter, remain a term of comparison well beyond the 17th century. His name was evoked several times on the occasion of the institution of the Grand Prix de Paysage Historique (1817), when the confrontation between the two pictorial genres became increasingly close. However, despite institutional efforts to maintain the partitioned hierarchy of the genres, French painting demonstrated a tendency to combine the different registers that it was supposed to be divided up into.
