Fancy pictures are a sub-genre of

genre painting Genre painting (or petit genre), a form of genre art, depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. One common definition of a genre scene is that it shows figures to whom no identity can be attached ...

s 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. Most fancy pictures depict children or young women, life-size or somewhat smaller, but some are landscapes with figures. The people depicted are more "democratic" than the upper-class subjects of portraits,Susan B. Egenolf, ''The Art of Political Fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth, and Owenson'', Farnham / Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2009,
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and are characteristically portrayed with what has been termed "a sort of contrived innocence",David Mannings
"Fancy picture"
''Grove Art Online'', , retrieved 19 February 2020 (subscription required for full access). sometimes eroticised. The term derives from fancies, which the art critic and historian George Vertue used in 1737 to describe paintings by Philip Mercier such as ''Venetian Girl at a Window'' or the series ''The Five Senses'', which incorporate a storyline or invented or imagined elements.

Joshua Reynolds Sir Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter, specialising in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depend ...

coined the extended term 'fancy pictures' in 1788 for the works painted by Thomas Gainsborough in his final decade, particularly those depicting beggar and peasant children."Fancy picture"
Tate Britain, retrieved 19 February 2020. Following his death, Gainsborough was initially best known for these pictures. Reynolds' own fancy pictures, while using street children as models, have allegorical and classical titles such as ''Hope Nursing Love'' and ''Venus Chiding Cupid''. The sub-genre owes inspiration to

Rembrandt Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (, ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally consid ...

and Murillo and was influenced by 18th-century French works, particularly by

Chardin Chardin is a French surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, (1699–1779), French painter noted for his still life works * Jean Chardin, (1643–1713), French jeweller and traveller, author of ''The Trave ...

, Greuze, as Mercier had been influenced by European artists including Watteau, but it is not a distinct sub-genre in French painting. 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.Kumiko Tanabe, "Hopkins's Obsession with Beauty and Fancy: The Influence of the Parnassian Movement and the Fancy Picture of J. E. Millais", in ''The Interconnections between Victorian Writers, Artists and Places'', ed. Kumiko Tanabe, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2019, , pp. 48–66
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Further reading