Fancy picture

The 'fancy picture' is a term that arose in eighteenth-century Britain to denote painting that combines scenes of everyday life with elements of imagination, invention, sentiment or implied narrative. Unlike the purely genre picture, which simply records a domestic scene, the fancy picture has no specific literary or historical source but instead creates a touching, idealized or poetic mood — often depicting children, peasants, beggars or shepherds in a sensuous, affecting manner. The word 'fancy' here means 'imagination' or 'fantasy'. The genre is most closely associated with the work of Thomas Gainsborough, who in his late period created moving images of rural children and the poor, as well as with Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth. Such paintings were extremely popular on the art market and in engraved reproductions, answering the age's taste for sentimentality and moral instruction. The fancy picture reflected the aesthetic preferences of the Enlightenment, particularly the cult of sensibility, and occupied an intermediate place between portraiture, genre painting and the idealized poetic scene.