Everyday life

Peasants bringing in the harvest, children at play, markets, taverns and Sunday outings: everyday life was long regarded as a lesser subject, yet it has given us some of the best-loved images in art. Genre painting shows how ordinary people have lived, worked and enjoyed themselves.

• Harvests in tombs and months in books of hours
• Pieter Bruegel: proverbs, games and peasant weddings
• Cardsharps, taverns and Jan Steen’s household
• The 18th century: grace before meals, gin and Spanish festivities
• Realism: stonebreakers, gleaners and third class
• Impressionism and the pleasures of modern life
• China: a city along the river
• Japan: the floating world and the road to Kyoto
• Skagen, Mora and Nordic folk life