| Greuze,
Jean-Baptiste (b. 1725, Tournus, d. 1805, Paris) |
| French painter. He
had a great success at the 1755 Salon with his Father Reading the Bible
to his Children (Louvre, Paris) 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 Septimus Severus Reproaching Caracalla (Louvre, 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 (Louvre) for example, alludes to lost 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 his career he received a commission to paint a portrait of Napoleon (1804-50, Versailles), but he died in poverty. His huge output is particularly well represented in the Louvre, the Wallace Collection in London, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, and in the museum dedicated to him in Tournus, his native town. |