18th C. School Jean Baptiste Greuze Peasant Child in a white
bonnet antiques LA . This exceptional painting of a peasant child in a white
Bonnet is a fine example of the style of Jean Baptiste Greuze, a very well
known and respected French painter of the 18th century.
Although unsigned, this work can be dated to the Greuze
period and contains many of the elements which the artist is known for. The
painting, if not by the hand of Greuze, is mot definitely by one of his close
students. Framed in nicely gilt and decorated wood frame. Documents from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.
The picture of a young peasant is usually referred to as an
allegory of “Innocence,” traditionally been equated with a sense of
innocence, gentleness, patience and humility. With such iconography in the
present picture, Greuze thus injects the female sitter with the same
characteristics. The depiction of young women tenderly and calmly sitting,
insinuating their ability to show tender emotion, relates to the 18th century
cult of sensibilité developed by Rousseau and his circle. Greuze’s subject thus
appears infused with the subtle combination of sexual innocence and emotional
depth. Same applied to his circle.
This type of subject, employing young girls in various
emotional states, reached its peak in Greuze’s career during the 1780s, thus
his circle as well.
Jean Baptiste Greuze was born at Tournus on Aug. 21, 1725.
His early life is undocumented, but he studied painting in Lyons and appeared
in Paris around 1750. He entered the Royal Academy as a student and worked with
Charles Joseph Natoire, a prominent decorative painter. During the 1760’s Greuze
achieved a significant reputation with his sentimental paintings of peasants or
lower-class people seen in humble surroundings and in the midst of theatrically
emotional family situations; examples are The Village Bride (1761), The
Father’s Curse (1765), and The Prodigal Son (1765).
In 1769 Greuze was admitted to the academy as a genre
painter. Ambitious to become a member of the academy as a history painter,
which was a higher rank, he was so angered by his admission as only a genre
painter that he refused to show his paintings at the academy’s exhibitions (the
Salons). However, by that time he was already famous and could afford to ignore
the Salons.
The rising importance of the middle class, and of
middle-class morality, also played a part in the success of Greuze’s cottage
genre. His work seemed to preach the homely virtues of the simple life, a
“return to nature,” and the honesty of unaffected emotion. The
blatant melodrama of his preaching was not found offensive, and visitors to the
Salons wept in front of his paintings. The intellectuals of the day were
generally opposed to the rococo as a decadent style; rather paradoxically,
Greuze’s most influential champion was Denis Diderot, one of the leading
philosophers of the Enlightenment, who hailed Greuze as “the painter of
virtue, the rescuer of corrupted morality.” The fashion for simplicity and
the “natural man” penetrated the highest circles, and engravings of
Greuze’s work were popular with all classes of society.
In terms of style, Greuze has been linked to neoclassicism.
The complexity of his compositions, however, and his interest in surface
textures place him within the general stylistic pattern of his period. In his
sensual paintings of girls (such as The Morning Prayer and The Milkmaid), with
their veiled eroticism, pale colors, and soft tonality, his connection with the
rococo is most evident. Some of Greuze’s best work is to be seen in his portraits
(for example, Étienne Jeaurat), which are often sensitive and direct. Greuze
survived the French Revolution but his fame did not. He died in Paris on March
21, 1805, in poverty and obscurity.
