^
Born on 21 August 1725: Jean-Baptiste
Greuze, French
Rococo
Era painter and draftsman who died on 21 March 1805.
— Born on in Tournus (Saône-et-Loire),
he studied under C. Grandon at Lyon before moving c. 1750 to Paris. His
studies at the Académie were desultory, but he was agréé in 1755 with La
lecture de la Bible which attracted attention in the Salon that year.
In 1557 his patron Louis Gougenot, abbé de
Chezal-Benôit, took him to Italy where Marigny also favored him with two
commissions from Mme. de Pompadour and where he painted La Paresseuse
Italienne and Les Œufs Cassés, both of which were praised
at the 1757 Salon.
In 1759 Greuze married Anne-Gabrielle Babuti
whose extravagance and infidelity were to cause him much hardship.
Greuze's moral genre scenes, combining a
topical sensibility with the domesticity of seventeenth-century Dutch masters,
attracted Diderot's praise at successive Salons: 'c'est la peinture
morale . . le pinceau n'a-t-il pas été assez et trop longtemps consacré
à la débauche et au vice? Ne devons-nous pas être satisfait de le voir concourir
enfin avec la poésie dramatique à nous toucher, à nous instruire, à nous
corriger et à nous inviter à la vertu?'
By 1769 Greuze had also shown some distinguished
portraits and established a Russian clientèle, but in that year his
exhibited morceau de réception (eight years overdue), the ambitious poussiniste
history The Emperor Severus Reprimanding his Son Caracalla, was
much criticized and he was reçu only as a peintre de genre.
He consequently withdrew from the Salon for thirty years, exhibiting privately
in his Louvre studio.
In the 1770s Greuze achieved a marked commercial
success with engravings of his subject pictures, and by the end of the decade
he was turning increasingly to painting languid têtes d'expression (of which
the 4th Marquess of Hertford became an uncritical admirer). In 1792 he painted
Napoléon as an artillery Captain (whole-length), and in 1793 he joined
the Commune des Arts, directed by Restout and David. He finally divorced
his wife the same year.
Greuze exhibited again at the Salon in 1800,
1801 and 1804 and died in Paris on 21 March 1805. His career had been hampered
both by his wife and by his inordinate vanity; 'C'est un excellent artiste',
wrote Diderot, 'mais une bien mauvaise tête'.
— Greuze had a great success at the 1755 Salon with his Father
Reading the Bible to His Children and went on to win enormous popularity
with similar sentimental and melodramatic genre scenes. His work was praised
by Diderot as ‘morality in paint’, and as representing
the highest ideal of painting in his day. He also wished to succeed as a
history painter, but his Septimius Severus Reproaching Caracalla
(1769) was rejected by the Salon, causing him acute embarrassment.
Much of Greuze's later work consisted of
titillating pictures of young girls, which contain thinly veiled sexual
allusions under their surface appearance of mawkish innocence; The Broken
Pitcher , for example, alludes to loss of virginity. With the swing
of taste towards Neoclassicism his work went out of fashion and he sank
into obscurity at the Revolution in 1789.
At the very end of Greuze's career he received
a commission to paint a portrait of Napoléon (1804), but he died
in poverty. His huge output enriches many museums.
— Greuze was named an associate member of the Académie Royale de Peinture
et de Sculpture, Paris, in 1755 on the strength of a group of paintings
that included genre scenes, portraits and studies of expressive heads (têtes
d’expression). These remained the essential subjects of his art for the
next 50 years, except for a brief, concentrated and unsuccessful experiment
with history painting in the late 1760s, which was to affect his later genre
painting deeply.
Though his art has often been compared with
that of Jean-Siméon Chardin in particular and interpreted within the context
of Neo-Classicism in general, it stands so strikingly apart from the currents
of its time that Greuze’s accomplishments are best described, as they often
were by the artist’s contemporaries, as unique. He was greatly admired by
connoisseurs, critics and the general public throughout most of his life.
His reputation declined towards the end of
his life and through the early part of the 19th century, to be revived after
1850, when 18th-century painting returned to favor, by such critics as Edmond
and Jules de Goncourt in their book L’Art du dix-huitième siècle.
By the end of the century Greuze’s work, especially his many variations
on the Head of a Girl, fetched record prices, and his Broken Pitcher
was one of the most popular paintings in the Louvre. The advent of modernism
in the early decades of the 20th century totally obliterated Greuze’s reputation.
It was only in the 1970s, with increased sale prices, important museum acquisitions
and fresh analyses of his art by young historians, that Greuze began to
regain the important place that he merits in the history of French art of
the 18th century.
— Greuze's students included Claude
Hoin, Joseph Ducreux, Constance Mayer, Pierre-Alexandre Wille.
^
— LINKS
— Self~Portrait
(77kb — ZOOM
to 338kb)
— Portrait d'une Jeune Fille
(1777, 57x48cm; 126kb)
— Le Citoyen Bernard Dubard
(1799, 67x54cm; 176 kb — ZOOM
to 324kb)
— Tête d'un Jeune Garçon
(186kb)
— Un
Garçon et son Chien (708x600pix, 28kb)
— Le
Conte Stroganov enfant (1778; 942x808pix, 43kb —
ZOOM
to 1323x1115pix, 55kb)
— Le
Paralytique (1763; 973x919pix, 80kb — ZOOM
to 1458x1378pix, 113kb)
— La
Malédiction Paternelle (1777; 803x1031pix, 157kb
— ZOOM
to 939x1545pix, 121kb)
— Un
écolier endormi sur son livre (1755; 822x879pix,
65kb; — ZOOM
to 2036x2446pix, 475kb — or, if you have time to spare to download
a poorly compressed image that does not look to me any better, try
this, 3150x2636pix, 1456kb)
— Le
Geste Napolitain (1757; 812x1051pix, 114kb — ZOOM
to 2031x2627pix, 881kb) — or try
this, 2031x2627pix, 8558kb)
— Le
Cordonnier Ivre (1780; 878x1219pix, 163kb — ZOOM
to 2029x2590pix, 1500kb) — or try
this, 2029x2590pix, 10'433kb)
— Indolence
aka La Paresseuse Italienne (1757; 812x1051pix, 114kb;— ZOOM
to 2641x2000pix, 881kb) — or, for more fun than watching grass grow,
try
this, 2641x2000pix, 9476kb)
— Jeune
Fille Pleurant son Oiseau Mort (1765; ovale 880x1016pix,
77kb — ZOOM
to 2378x2032pix, 475kb) — or try
this, 2385x2036pix, 7373kb)
— Le
Pot Cassé (1785, ovale 110x85cm; 985x799pix,
74kb;— ZOOM
to 2479x1994pix, 425kb) _ 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 [“bear”ly seen
in the shadows at the right: you may need to set your screen to its brightest]
in the antique style being only a fashionable attribute. — see a more
innocent, or more subtle, Le
Vase Cassé by Bouguereau
[30 November 1825 – 19 August 1905]
— The
Broken Mirror (1763, 56x46cm; 728x600cm, 34kb) _ The
Hogarthian morality shows the consequences of thoughtlessness; everything
is in disorder, and both the mirror and the girl's reputation are shattered.
— The
Broken Eggs (1756, 73x94cm) _ This picture was painted in Rome, but
despite the Italian costumes and setting, the source of the iconography
is a seventeenth-century Dutch painting by Frans
van Mieris the Elder, The Broken Eggs, which Greuze knew through
an engraving. The broken eggs symbolize the loss of virginity. The little
boy trying to repair one of the eggs represents the uncomprehending innocence
of childhood. This picture was praised in Rome, and it attracted favorable
comment when exhibited in Paris in the Salon of 1757. One critic noted that
the young girl had a pose so noble that she could embellish a history painting.
Exhibited with the present picture was a pendant, The Neapolitan Gesture
of 1757. In it, the same four models appear, but the seducer is foiled by
the old woman.
— Complaining
about the Watch (1775, 79x61cm) _ 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.
— Votive
Offering to Cupid (1767, 146x113cm) _ 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.
— George
Gougenot de Croissy (1758, 81x64cm) _ It is probably shortly after the
14 March 1757 marriage of George Gougenot de Croissy and Marie-Angélique
de Varenne, the daughter of the King's equerry and counsellor-secretary,
that Greuze painted their portraits. George Gougenot was the younger brother
of Abbé 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 présent 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
colorist, as are his French contemporaries Jean Antoine Watteau or Jean-Honoré
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.
— Innocence
(1790, 63x53cm) — The
Village Betrothal (1761) — Study
of a Young Boy (37x29cm) |
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