Fancy picture

Fancy pictures are a sub-genre of genre paintings in 18th-century English art, featuring scenes of everyday life but with an imaginative or storytelling element, usually sentimental. The usage of the term varied, and there was often an overlap with the conversation piece, a type of group portrait showing the subjects engaged in some activity. Eighteenth-century fancy pictures were an antecedent of Victorian sentimentalism; J. E. Millais' paintings of children, such as his My First Sermon and My Second Sermon, modelled by his young daughter, were called fancy pictures.

Fancy picture

Fancy pictures are a sub-genre of genre paintings in 18th-century English art, featuring scenes of everyday life but with an imaginative or storytelling element, usually sentimental. The usage of the term varied, and there was often an overlap with the conversation piece, a type of group portrait showing the subjects engaged in some activity. Eighteenth-century fancy pictures were an antecedent of Victorian sentimentalism; J. E. Millais' paintings of children, such as his My First Sermon and My Second Sermon, modelled by his young daughter, were called fancy pictures.