Painting sorts into a handful of genres: history painting, portraits, scenes of everyday life, landscapes, still life, plus cityscape as landscape's city cousin. The old art academies ranked them in that order, from most respected to least. This guide covers each one and links to the full page behind it.
Art academies fixed this ranking centuries ago, and painters spent the next three hundred years arguing with it.
My honest opinion: the ranking reads backwards today. On this site, the still life and landscape guides get read as much as anything about history painting.
History Painting
History painting covers religious scenes, mythology, and grand historical moments, the genre the old academies ranked highest. This site covers it in two guides, religion and the sacred, and Greek mythology in painting.
Portrait
Portraits are their own genre, built around a single face and everything it can carry. The full guide is portraiture and the human figure in art.
Genre Scenes and Everyday Life
Genre scenes show ordinary people doing ordinary things: eating, working, playing cards, arguing. The full guide is work and everyday life in painting.
Landscape
Landscape became its own genre once painters stopped treating scenery as a backdrop for saints and started painting it for its own sake. Dutch painters pushed this hardest, in the seventeenth century.
Twelve landscapes that changed how painters saw the outdoors are in the full guide.
Still Life
Still life sat at the bottom of the academic ranking for centuries: fruit, flowers, dead game, arranged and painted with no story attached. Painters kept making them anyway.
Twelve still life paintings that turned ordinary objects into art are in the full guide.
Cityscape
Cityscape split off from landscape once painters started treating towns and skylines as subjects worth painting on their own, not just scenery behind a portrait.
Twelve cityscapes, from Vermeer's Delft to Impressionist Paris, are in the full guide.
Art historians usually trace the ranking itself to 1667, a lecture by Andre Felibien at the French Academy: history painting first, then portrait, then genre, then landscape, then still life last. I still think he had it backwards.
Looking for a painter instead of a genre? The full list is in artists. For movements instead of genres, that guide is art movements in painting.
Quick answers
What are the main genres of painting? History painting, portrait, genre scenes, landscape, and still life. The old French Academy ranked them in that order, from most to least respected.
What is the difference between history painting and genre painting? History painting shows religious, mythological, or historical scenes meant to teach a lesson. Genre painting shows ordinary daily life with no lesson attached.
Why was still life ranked lowest of the genres? The Academy valued paintings that told a moral or historical story. A bowl of fruit tells no story, so it ranked last.
Is cityscape its own genre or part of landscape? Cityscape grew out of landscape painting and is usually treated as a branch of it, focused on towns and skylines instead of countryside.
What counts as a portrait in painting? Any painting built around a specific person's likeness, from formal commissions to quick studies of friends and family.
When did painters stop caring about the genre ranking? By the Impressionist era, in the mid eighteen hundreds, painters were treating landscape and still life as seriously as any history painting.
Who created the ranking of painting genres? Andre Felibien, in a 1667 lecture to the French Academy that set history painting at the top and still life at the bottom.