In the 18^th century, France’s powerful Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture dictated a strict hierarchy of subject matter, with historical, mythological, and religious scenes at the top, followed by portraiture, landscape, genre, and still life. Today, however, the “lowlier” subjects often resonate more with viewers lacking the knowledge to identify and contextualize battle scenes or biblical references. Genre pictures have the charm of offering a window onto everyday life in a bygone era. The Sweetness of Life: Three 18^th-Century French Paintings from The Frick Collection, which opens this month at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, makes that point exquisitely.

The title works represent three of the finest artists of their day: François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Boucher’s A Lady on Her Day Bed (1743) nods playfully at Renaissance depictions of the goddess of love, hence its nickname, “Untidy Venus.” Influenced by 17th-century Dutch painting, Chardin’s serene Lady with a Bird-Organ (ca. 1753) shows a woman cranking a serinette to teach a melody to a canary (serin). Finally, in Greuze’s Wool Winder (ca. 1759), a young servant looks on placidly as a playful cat disrupts the task at hand. The three canvases’ temporary home is the museum’s 18^th-century Rococo gallery, in the company of other Chardins and Bouchers, as well as paintings by Jean-Antoine Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.