Genre painting was popular in the United States from about 1830 until the outbreak of the Civil War. Among its well-known practitioners is Albert Fitch Bellows. A painter born in Milford, Massachusetts, Bellows apprenticed at an early age with a lithographer in Boston and later with the architectural firms of Ammi Burnham Young and J. B. Toule, before becoming headmaster of the New England School of Design in Boston. In 1857–58, he studied art in Antwerp and Paris, and he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Society of Painters of Belgium. He returned to the United States in 1858 and settled in New York City, where he eventually was elected to the National Academy of Design. He traveled to Europe again in 1867, returning to Boston, then, following a disastrous fire that destroyed his studio, resettled in New York. He was also represented in the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and the Paris Exposition of 1878. A specialist in moral and sentimental tales of childhood and rural village scenes depicting humble and simple pleasures, Bellows also painted lush landscapes in watercolor and, later, made etchings.

The Lost Child Returned is the only genre painting in Bayou Bend’s collection. It takes as its themes two popular views in Victorian America: the restoration of domestic harmony and the vision of country life as unaffected and simple. The picture was painted during Bellows’s year of study in Belgium. The village architecture and the sign outside the building at left that reads “KANTES” (Dutch for lace, which is echoed visually by the bit of lace fluttering in the wind beside the gable) identify it as a Belgian setting, specifically one that included the lace making for which Belgium was internationally famous. Bellows built the scene in a pyramid: its center, composed of the village processional—the father and daughter, other interested parties hearing the news of her return; its left, a village shopkeeper (identified by his apron) and a shopper (identified by her basket of vegetables and wrapped bundle); and its right, the joyful family group under a spreading tree, which envelops the scene—the mother, children, perhaps a friend or relative, and, presumably, the grandmother at the doorway holding a cane. Delightful details such as the dog carrying the child’s shoe in his mouth, the curious neighbor poking her head out of a window, the woman at midground tugging on the man’s jacket as if anxious for news indicate the artist’s skill in storytelling, an aspect of Bellows’s art that surely contributed to his popularity as a genre painter.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.