L'art de la vie quotidienne: art of everyday life
Jo is delighted to share the theme for THE SUSSEX 2025 with you all.
It felt appropriate to focus on our own environments, allowing a space for observation and appreciation of the minutia of everyday life. An opportunity to observe everyday life, be it food, friends and family, your neighborhood, working environment, leisure activities, or the staples of everyday life in this time that we are all living in.
The artistic representation of everyday life allows an insight into the sociality, objects, and work of moments in time. Throughout the centuries, it has often been referred to as Genre Art. It can be realistic, imagined, or romanticised by you, the artist.
There have been great periods of Genre Art throughout history, and genre art has been used as an umbrella term for artworks depicting various categories.
Still life
Marine
Architectural
Animal
General scenes of society
In education, most of history is taught by important people such as kings, queens, sovereigns, presidents, prime ministers, dictators, and other types of leaders. Ordinary people and their lives don’t receive that much attention. By celebrating and depicting the art of everyday life, we invite you, the artist, to elevate and share your own observations of L'art de la vie quotidienne.
We thought it might be helpful to expand upon how Genre Art has been depicted and changed over the centuries. Read on for our brief, potted history of the art of everyday life.
Women undertaking ordinary tasks have historical significance, such as Johannes Vermeer's The Milkmaid evokes the quiet absorption that characterizes his work. He is known and celebrated for his ability to make the ordinary extraordinary.
The Milkmaid (Vermeer) 1657
The painting shows a milkmaid, a woman who milks cows and makes dairy products like butter and cheese, in a plain room carefully pouring milk into a squat earthenware container on a table. Milkmaids began working solely in the stables before large houses hired them to do housework as well rather than hiring out for more staff. Also on the table in front of the milkmaid are various types of bread. She is a young, sturdily built woman wearing a crisp linen cap, a blue apron and work sleeves pushed up from thick forearms.
Wiliam Powell Firth was a prolific Victorian painter who depicted contemporary scenes in the 1850s. Firth was fascinated with the brief moments in his time with ordinary people and captured these moments through his paintings. Firth focused on scenes of everyday life, anticipating the impressionists and what became their rich depictions of everyday spaces of modern life, such as cafes and theatres.
The Railway Station, William Powell Frith, 1862
It depicts a scene at the busy Paddington Station railway terminus of the Great Western in London. Frith had developed a reputation for producing crowd scenes of everyday life, including Ramsgate Sands (1854) and The Derby Day (1858). Frith himself was doubtful about the potential work, noting, "I don't think the station at Paddington could be called picturesque, nor can the clothes of the ordinary traveler be said to offer much attraction to the painter,” but was persuaded by his art dealer Louis Flatow who offered him reportedly the most significant commission fee ever provided to an artist.
The panorama represents all social classes of Victorian society, using the still relatively new railway system. On the right, two detectives arrest a man as he attempts to board a train.
British artists such as Walter Sickart and others associated with the Camden Town Group focused on urban modernity. They explored the subject through honest scenes of London bars, theatres, and music halls.
The Balcony at the Alhambra,
Spencer Gore (1878–1914)
A short-lived group of sixteen - all male - artists who met every week, often at the studio of Walter Sickert in Camden, north London, from which the group derived their name. They held three exhibitions together at the Carfax Gallery in 1911 and 1912. The artists involved, especially Sickert, Gilman, Ginner, and Gore, were interested in portraying everyday life and people in pre-war London, and they all broadly shared an interest in Post-Impressionist painting. In 1913, the group evolved into the London Group.
Domestic interiors were frequently depicted in drab and dreary ways during this time. Harold Gilman’s interiors, made in the early years of the 20th century, compressed space, making them feel compressed and claustrophobic.
In Sickert's House,
Harold Gilman (1876–1919)
In 1907 Harold Gilman met Sickert and became one of the leading figures in his circle: he was a founder member of the Camden Town Group in 1911 and of the London Group (of which he was first president) in 1913. His early work was rather sombre, but under the influence of Sickert he adopted a higher colour register and a technique of using a mosaic of opaque touches. From Sickert also he derived his taste for working-class subjects. After Roger Fry's first Post-Impressionist exhibition (1910) and a visit to Paris (1911) he used very thick paint and bright (sometimes garish) colour. He was one of the most gifted English painters of his generation and one of the most distinctive in his reaction to Post-Impressionism, but his career was cut short by the influenza epidemic of 1919.
In America, Edward Hopper produced similar examinations of modern life. His purposely dimly lit works are infused with a greater sense of alienation despite being set in busy city locations.
Automat (Hopper) 1927
The painting portrays a lone woman staring into a cup of coffee in an automat at night. The reflection of identical rows of light fixtures stretches through the night-blackened window.
As is often the case in Hopper's paintings, the woman's circumstances and mood are ambiguous. She is well-dressed and wearing makeup, which could indicate either that she is on her way to or from work at a job where personal appearance is important or that she is on her way to or from a social occasion.
She has removed only one glove, which may indicate either that she is distracted, that she is in a hurry and can stop only for a moment, or simply that she has just come in from outside and has not yet warmed up. But the latter possibility seems unlikely, for there is a small empty plate on the table in front of her cup and saucer, suggesting that she may have eaten a snack and been sitting at this spot for some time.
Post-war artist Ruskin Spear made socialist realistic art, affectionately observing and depicting pubs in his much-beloved borough of Hammersmith, London.
Alf and the Canary,
Ruskin Spear (1911–1990)
Spear was best known for his affectionate and intimate studies of pub life and the characters to be found there. Also known as ‘Mr Hollingberry’s Canary’, this painting illustrates a scene from the ‘Hampshire Hog’ pub in the Hammersmith area of London where Spear lived all his life. The influence of Walter Sickert and the Camden group was evident in this aspect of Spear’s work, with its sense of place and focus on the leisure time of working people. Spear became a sought-after portrait painter in his later career.
Spear taught many of the ‘Kitchen Sink Artists’ who were active in the 1950s and committed to creating a version of hyper-realism in which every ordinary, banal object or person was celebrated. Art critic David Sylvester wrote of them in 1954 that their subject was ‘Everything but the kitchen sink—the kitchen sink too.’
Kitchen,
John Bratby, 1965
Bratby worked in a harsh realist style, applying the paint thickly in vibrant colours and portraying sometimes ugly and desperate faces in domestic settings. Van Gogh and Soutine influenced his vigorous realism. This concern with social realism brought Bratby into contact with Jack Smith (1928-2011), Edward Middleditch (1923–87), and Derrick Greaves (b 1927), and these artists became the leading exponents of the Kitchen Sink school. However, while the Kitchen Sink artists shared a desire to depict the banality of a working-class domestic environment, Bratby’s use of colors and his more middle-class surroundings distinguished his style from that of his peers.
In our time, and more recently, Caroline Walker has turned her attention to quietly intimate, voyeuristic depictions of women at work. Her observations and studies of women at work in contemporary society include a poignant focus on mothers and childbirth, an entirely everyday occurrence that we are all the product of. She is actively expanding the art of the everyday genre, art showing the stuff of life.
Study for 'Table Laying, Late Morning, May'
Caroline Walker (b.1982)
L'art de la vie quotidienne: the art of everyday life subject matter can be varied and has been over the centuries, from milkmaids in the 17th century, fleeting glimpses into family life, to busy community everyday occurrences. It is a theme that has evolved over many years. Marcel Duchamp made art from a ceramic urinal and found objects such as soup cans immortalized by Andy Warhol. Mattresses use, and emotional exploration of their pleasure have been explored by Sarah Lucas and Dame Tracey Emin.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 2000, Sarah Lucas
Lucas’s bawdy humor takes a darker turn in this work. She uses a variety of household objects to produce a witty metaphor for sexual activity. However, the comic references contrast with the sobering presence of a cardboard coffin. The title refers to a seminal text by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He suggested that the drive for life is matched by an equal and opposite drive for death so that pleasure is bound up with destruction.
The genre's contemporary expansion and development can be traced back to village fairs and taverns in the 17th century. We can’t wait to see your response to THE SUSSEX 2025 theme.
We have moved the annual exhibition to November to better fit into our yearly program of exhibitions and showcases around the county.
After two years of challenges with mail (hawks), we have moved the submission process to our website. After you have completed the submission form and paid for your submission, a link to submit your artwork image will be sent out separately via email.
We love you like jelly tots and listen to and hear your frustrations.
The number of entries is capped at 2500, and once they have sold, there will be no last-minute entries. Once you've filled in the form and purchased your entry/ies, you will be sent a link to the upload site. Make sure you upload your artwork image by the 31st of August 2025 at 23.59. We will send reminders and prompts.
It is now open for submissions