Bio
Greuze was born in Tournus on August 21, 1725. In Lyon he was a student of Grandon’s, a portraitist. In 1755 he arrived in Paris in order to enroll in the Academy. Painter Louis de Silvestre and sculptor Pigalle supported his works, and his first canvases attracted the attention of Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully, an important collector. That same year he gained fame with Le père de famille expliquant la Bible à ses enfants (Father Explaining the Bible to his Children), which he presented at the Salon. It was a genre painting that exalted the simple virtues of the poor and emphasized the moral issue of family education, which would mark all of his production. The public received his subsequent works, such as L’Accordée de village (The Village Bride, 1761, Louvre Museum, Paris) and La Piété filiale, ou le paralytique secouru par ses enfants (Paralyzed Man Cared for by His Children, 1763, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), with enthusiasm, and they also garnered applause on the part of writer Denis Diderot. Following his failed attempt to be accepted by the Academy as a history painter, the highest category possible for an artist, he negated participating in official activities. However, he did present his works at private exhibitions with great success during the following years, when his style inclined toward compositions that incursion into moral questions. In these works, Greuze was inspired in formal terms by Poussin; he eliminated details and accentuated the description of emotions by means of a marked body language in the faces and hands. In 1770 he was famous on account of countless prints that had been made based on his work. But at that same time and during the decades that followed, when neoclassic ideas began to emerge, he painted works known as “expression studies.” They are figures of young innocent looking women, charged with sentimentalism, presented partially clothed. He gave these canvases titles such as Sadness or Innocence. Even though these works generated widespread repercussions and were copied on a large scale, the ideas of the Revolution moved the public in the direction of other interests, and as a result Greuze lapsed into poverty and oblivion. He received occasional commissions from Napoleon and his circle. His death, which occurred in Paris in 1805, passed unnoticed.
