As a special cultural phenomenon, the choice of a theme for custom painting mainly comes from daily life, which is full of humanism and a direct reflection of society. From the perspective of art, custom painting reflects the aesthetic fashion of different classes in society. This paper attempts to combine the golden periods of the development of custom painting in the history of Chinese and Western art: China's Song Dynasty and the Netherlands in the 17th Century. From the perspective of art sociology, it tries to see how Chinese and Western custom paintings constructed aesthetic values and dealt with the interaction between the function of custom painting and the motivation of creation, in order to form a new understanding of custom painting.