GREUZE, Jean-Baptiste

Ange Laurent de La Live de Jully (1725-1779) was a wealthy art collector and amateur artist. Unlike many other Parisian collectors, who favoured works of Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Renaissance masters, La Live de Jully made a conscious effort to collect contemporary French artists. His enthusiastic support of the visual arts led to his election in 1754 to the office of honorary member of the Acad�mie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris.

In Greuze’s portrait, La Live de Jully is shown as a gentleman cultivated in music and the visual arts. He is depicted in the study of his Paris residence, seated on a low, broad chair with conspicuous classical detailing, behind which is a matching writing table. On the right end of the table stands a marble statue of the Erythrean Sibyl by Jean-Jacques Caffi�ri. The furniture is designed in a precociously neoclassical style by Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain with bronze mounts. The ebony-veneered writing table and a matching filing cabinet are now in the Mus�e Cond�, Chantilly.

The subject of a young woman depicted partially undressed, with her breasts exposed, is typical of Greuze’s unique mixture of voluptuousness and dreamy reflection that he first developed circa 1765, and subsequently repeated on numerous occasions through a wide range of variants.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was one of Europe’s first celebrity painters. He built a reputation on instructive paintings that covered the edifying themes of the education of children, the virtues of a simple, provincial family life, and the heroism of everyday activities.

Epiphany depicts a peasant family participating in the annual celebration of the “gateau de roi” (a Catholic feast held each year on the 6th of January), where the children search for a bean hidden in the king’s cake, the finder of which will become king for the day. Just as the philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were asking the country’s bourgeoisie to rid themselves of the distractions and trappings of civilisation - to return to nature and a moral, family life - Greuze’s Epiphany makes clear the simple (if completely illusory) pleasures of the honest, peasant family, uncorrupted by the temptations of modern, bourgeois life.

The painting is signed lower left: J. B. Greuze, 1774.

In this pastel study the artist brilliantly captures the sense of someone suddenly recoiling in fright and dread. The face contrasts with Greuze’s frequently languid expressions of young girls’ heads.

This painting is a characteristic example of a type of painting that Greuze and his followers produced in considerable quantity in the last three decades of his career. It is possibly a studio copy or version by a follower of an original by Greuze.

Like many painters, Greuze had produced studies of individual heads as drawings and in oil from early in his career. Some of them were nature studies, others specifically prepared figures in his larger narrative paintings. From the late 1770s, these ‘expressive heads’ developed into a separate genre, often erotically charged, and into a main field of his activities. Greuze’s heads exist in large numbers, and he developed them more systematically after he had fallen out with the Academy. Many of them were executed by studio members, and there are general questions of attribution concerning the group.

Greuze exhibited at the Salon of 1757 four pictures ‘dans le costume italien’, including Indolence or La Paresseuse Italienne. Here one might see the influence not only of Caravaggio but of Subleyras, notably in the beautiful response to tones of cream and white, set off by passages of warm colour, like the girl’s scarlet shoes. Greuze’s feel for textures is demonstrated in the range of material suggested: from the delicacy of glass to the coarse fabric of the skirt, not overlooking the pale yet sensuously heavy tones of flesh. A typically Greuzian fondness for the pleasures of disorder characterizes the whole composition. Not Italy but his own temperament seems the inspiration behind it.

This painting is the essence of Greuze, compositionally as well as in other ways. His preferred setting is an interior, a shallow stage-like area, normally with one right-angled wall; the figures are assembled in a loosely-knit frieze across the composition, a tendency increasing in his later work. Greuze concentrated on human nature, excluding the natural world and simplifying the setting so as not to distract from the gamut of emotions expressed by the faces. Each figure expresses an individual reaction to the moment. Disunity in the family is prophesied, for the mother tearfully must part with her daughter, whose younger sister is also saddened, while her elder is sullenly envious. The tearful, yet ineffective females contrast with the trio of men: the dignified father praising his daughter and exhorting his future son-in-law, a serious young man who receives girl, dowry and exhortation, and the sly peasant notary who literally documents the occasion and reminds us that it is as much legal as domestic.

The term “à la polonaise” in reference to eighteenth-century dress usually implied the addition of fur as a lining or edging of female garments. In the present case, however, the fur appears independent of the subject’s coat.

As a draughtsman Greuze was astonishing in his range and accomplishment, in style as much as in subject-matter, the pen drawing of his wife is in itself a miniature masterpiece.

It is probably shortly after their marriage on 14 March 1757 that Greuze painted the portraits of George Gougenot de Croissy and his wife, Marie-Ang�lique de Varenne, the daughter of the King’s equerry and counsellor-secretary. Both paintings remained together until 1937, when they were bought by two separate collectors at an auction in Paris. In 1951 the portrait of George Gougenot found its way into the Brussels museum, and that of his wife 25 years later into the New Orleans Museum of Art.

George Gougenot was the younger brother of Abb� Louis Gougenot, Greuze’s friend and protector. He started his career in the navy, and followed his father as the King’s counsellor-secretary. Gougenot was not only an art connoisseur, patron and an erudite man, but also showed interest in more general topics, publishing anonymously a study entitled Etat pr�sent de la Pensylvanie (1756). In the portrait Gougenot wears a grey velvet costume, decorated with superbly reproduced cuffs and a jabot in “point d’argentan”. His hand lies on the Spectator, an English journal, founded in London in 1711 to raise moral standards. The subtle grey gradations accentuate the penetrating look and the intelligent face, with the somewhat disdainful line around the mouth. The powdered wig, the refined representation of the fabric, and the vague, neutral background, produce an atmosphere of distinction and courtliness.

In his anecdotal compositions, Greuze exhibits his preference for moralising scenes. Unlike certain contemporaries, among them Hubert Robert, with their love of antiques, Greuze instead prefers to seek his inspiration from rustics and sentimental bourgeois life. Alongside his often grandiloquent representations, Greuze also executed a number of elegant but also psychological portraits, such as the canvas discussed here, a typical example from the Rococo period. Although Greuze is not a born colourist, as are his French contemporaries Jean Antoine Watteau or Jean-Honor� Fragonard, he succeeds in imparting a warmth to this portrait by means of harmonic light gradations. The particular sensitivity with which it is painted can perhaps be explained by the painter’s friendship for his noble model.

Greuze proved himself positively tough and uncompromising as a portraitist, especially of characterful men.

Greuze was also a portrait painter, occasionally revealing the influence of Rembrandt in his use of light.

The oval format of this portrait was a frequent choice by Greuze when painting half length figures; attention could be concentrated on the face and hands and it served to compliment the curves of the human figure. Of Mme de Courcelles herself we know nothing; although an ancient family, its members at this date seem not to have held any positions of importance in the civil or military service of the Crown.

This portrait is probably a preliminary study for the Head of a Boy at the Wallace Collection, London.

This portrait belongs to a group of somber male portraits that Greuze executed during the French Revolution.

The expressive head exercises of girls and boys by Greuze were quite popular and became one of the painter’s specialties. With the face leaning to the left and a pensive look, the girl in the present painting seems deep in thought.

Born to humble beginnings as the daughter of a seamstress, the Comtesse du Barry (1746-1793), n�e Marie Jeanne B�cu, rose to become one of the most famous figures in the court of Louis XV. Her influence was born out of her legendary powers of seduction, which she used to gain the title of Maîtresse-en-titre (chief mistress of the King of France), the last to fill the position in the court of Louis XV.

Madame du Barry’s support for the arts was also legendary, and she came to amass one of the great collections in France in the 18th century. She had her portrait painted by some of the leading artists of the day, including Louise �lisabeth Vig�e-Lebrun, Fran�ois-Hubert Drouais, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze.

Greuze was in his late 50s when he conceived of this portrait of himself. It was a difficult period for him personally, because his notoriously difficult marriage was finally coming apart, but at the same time he was painting some of his most important genre pictures. In these he created scenes from contemporary life that combined an unblinkered view of the world around him with a style derived from the grand manner of the traditional historical painter. His penetrating insight into his subjects’ motivation and personality is also evident in the portraits and self-portraits of which he made many at this time.

The present self-portrait reveals the artist’s remarkable skills as a pastelist. The painter draws himself in bust-length, turned three-quarters to the right and directly engaging the viewer. His hair is powdered and dressed in the “pigeon wing” style, which he wore throughout his life. He is wearing an elegant coat and waistcoat and around his neck is a loosely tied white jabot.

This pastel is clearly related to Greuze’s Self-portrait in the Muse� du Louvre, Paris.

This painting by Greuze is frankly Poussin-like. The artist wished to be recognized as a history painter; he chose an obscure subject to illustrate: Septimius Severus Roman emperor (146-211) reproaches his son, Caracalla for trying to assasinate him. Varied emotions are at work within it: from Caracalla’s angry shame to the surprise of the chamberlain, Castor, at the emperor’s recklessly heroic gesture which is at once a challenge and a rebuke.

Back in Paris from Italy, Greuze seems to have come close temporarily to Chardin’s handling of paint - seldom closer than in the fine Student (�colier qui �tudie sa le�on), which has the unforced sobriety of his best male portraits.

Although Greuze painted this towards the end of his stay in Italy it shows the strong influence of seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the work of the slightly older French artist Chardin.

The Hogarthian morality shows the consequences of thoughtlessness; everything is in disorder, and both the mirror and the girl’s reputation are shattered.

The painting shows a young girl at a well. One sees immediately that Greuze was concerned to convey eroticism in the Rococo manner, the badly proportioned lion of the well in the antique style being only a fashionable attribute.

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In contrast with Chardin Greuze increased his popularity by taking his scenes out into villages and emphasizing the humble rank of his actors. The rustic fallacy was only one chord of falseness played on by Greuze. Anything that might have been a hint in Chardin becomes in Greuze an over-stated illustration: we must now witness those countless anecdotes with doves and broken mirrors in all of which there is a confused appeal to sentimentality and a lack of confidence in art that is unsupported by narrative. Greuze made the naive mistake that a moving anecdote will make a moving work of art. He begot a fearful progeny of nineteenth-century academic work throughout Europe from which came nothing except the problem picture. That he was quite capable of apprehending and conveying reality is shown by his often excellent portraits, but he wished to make some more striking contribution to art. He did indeed succeed in expressing something of the spirit of his age; he spoke the new language, as foreign to Chardin as to Boucher, of the heart.

In the last years of Greuze’s career, his moralising, dramatic genre scenes and severe manner had become unfashionable. With The Dead Bird he returned to a lighter, pleasing vein like that of The Broken Pitcher - a type that was more prized by his contemporaries.

After the failure of his Septimus Severus and Caracalla, Greuze devoted himself to genre painting with moralizing undertones, which he treats with emphasis, rigour and sobriety. In the tradition of the Bible parable of the prodigal son, The Father’s Curse first describes a father cursing his son, who neglects the family (of which he is the sole support) to join the army, and in the subsequent scene, the son finding his father dead on his return. Adopting the canons of classical history painting, Greuze employs a frieze composition, a sombre, matte colouring, and eloquent gestures, shunning an over-accurate description of details.

After the failure of his Septimus Severus and Caracalla, Greuze devoted himself to genre painting with moralizing undertones, which he treats with emphasis, rigour and sobriety. In the tradition of the Bible parable of the prodigal son, The Father’s Curse first describes a father cursing his son, who neglects the family (of which he is the sole support) to join the army, and in the subsequent scene, the son finding his father dead on his return. Adopting the canons of classical history painting, Greuze employs a frieze composition, a sombre, matte colouring, and eloquent gestures, shunning an over-accurate description of details.

This moralizing genre painting is more overtly religious and Catholic than most of the artist’s paintings. The scene is set in a rocky landscape, where the central figure, an elderly Capuchin friar, sits distributing rosaries to large group of girls and young women. The girls are bringing food to the hermit and, in return, he is giving them rosaries and votary medals, which he takes from a box held by a handsome young friar. The girls are dressed in ordinary gowns, apart from the two closest to the hermit who are all in white; they are receiving rosaries from him in preparation for their confirmation.

The theme is one of charity, generosity and virtue: the young women are taking physical care of the hermit and he, in return, is giving them spiritual rewards.

The didactic message that Diderot hailed in the Paralytic or The Fruits of a Good Upbringing (exhibited at the Salon of 1763) forces the personages to assume expressive theatrical poses, but does not strip their faces of the superficial sentimentality typical of the Rococo. With this “high-moral coquetry,” Greuze undoubtedly paved the way for the academic painting of the nineteenth century.

Greuze had a descriptive, Dutch-style art with moralizing tendency. Northern influence can be clearly detected: highly-accomplished draftsmanship, an accumulation of familiar, down-to-earth details, concern for accuracy, the complicated dress of women, a setting orchestrated around some minor domestic drama, and a well-balanced use of grays and whites.

The girl’s costume, her act of sacrifice, and the architectural details evoke antiquity, though such academism is not easisly accomodated by Greuze’s easy sentimentality.

This painting would appear to represent a betrothal portrait of a young girl who is perhaps engaged, or of marriageable age, indicated by the garland of white flowers in her hair and the orange she holds - a symbol of love and marriage.

The Young Peasant Boy exemplifies the artist’s interest in a specific genre of allegorical portraiture - pictures not meant to be pure likenesses of a specific sitter, but meant to evoke in the viewer an emotional response. These ‘portraits’ were creations of Greuze’s imagination. The boy here depicted, in his rustic red vest, appears to be less the child of a farmer than that of an upper-class family in the guise of a peasant child. However, what Greuze has perfectly instilled in his portrayal, through the direct and guileless gaze of this young boy, is the unadulterated innocence of childhood.