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The depiction of everyday leisure activity was an infrequent, if not entirely unknown, subject matter in Western art until the 17th and 18th centuries. With the rise of the Dutch and Flemish Baroque in Northern Europe and the Rococo in France, however, there was a concomitant proliferation of secular themes. In these periods, genre works began to value probing the everyday life of ordinary individuals as a worthy endeavor in its own right, which subsequently became a central focus of the emerging avant-garde of the 19th century. Whether simply lounging alone or as part of a larger social …