Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Greuze was born at Tournus, a market town in Burgundy. He is generally said to have formed his own talent; at an early age his inclinations, though thwarted by his father, were encouraged by a Lyonnese artist named Grandon, or Grondom, who enjoyed during his lifetime considerable reputation as a portrait-painter. Grandon not only persuaded Greuze's father to give way to his son's wishes, and permit the boy to accompany him as his pupil to Lyon, but, when at a later date he left Lyon for Paris, Grandon carried young Greuze with him.

Settled in Paris, Greuze worked from the living model in the school of the Royal Academy, but did not attract the attention of his teachers; and when he produced his first picture, Le Père de famille expliquant la Bible a ses enfants, considerable doubt was felt and shown as to his share in its production. By other and more remarkable works of the same class Greuze soon established his claims beyond contest, and won the notice and support of the well-known connoisseur La Live de Jully, the brother-in-law of Madame d'Epinay. In 1755 Greuze exhibited his Aveugle trompé, upon which, presented by Pigalle the sculptor, he was immediately agréé by the Academy. Towards the close of the same year, he left France for Italy, in company with the Abbé Louis Gougenot. Gougenot had some acquaintance with the arts, and was highly valued by the Academicians, who, during his journey with Greuze, elected him an honorary member of their body on account of his studies in mythology and allegory; his acquirements in these respects are said to have been largely utilized by them, but to Greuze they were of doubtful advantage, and he lost rather than gained by this visit to Italy in Gougenot's company. He had undertaken it probably in order to silence those who taxed him with ignorance of great models of style, but the Italian subjects which formed the entirety of his contributions to the Salon of 1757 showed that he had been put on a false track, and he speedily returned to the source of his first inspiration.

Edgar Munhall organized the first major exhibition devoted to the artist: "Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1725–1805" (1976–1977). The exhibition opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and then traveled to the California Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon. In 2002, the first exhibition of Greuze's drawings was held at The Frick Collection in New York. It was also organized by Munhall, who wrote the catalog.

In the second chapter of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story The Valley of Fear, Holmes's discussion of his enemy Professor Moriarty involves a Greuze painting in his possession, intended to illustrate Moriarty's wealth despite his small legitimate salary as an academic. A 1946 episode of the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes entitled "The Girl With the Gazelle" centers around the theft of a fictional Greuze painting of the same name, masterminded by Professor Moriarty. In the sixth part of The Leopard, a novel by the Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the Prince of Salina watches a Greuze painting, La Mort du Juste, and he starts thinking about death (as the "safety exit" which relieves older men of their anxieties) and judges that the pretty girls surrounding the dying man and the "disorder of their clothes suggested sex more than sorrow... were the real subject of the picture." In the sixteenth chapter of E. M. Forster's novel Maurice, Clive mentions that he finds himself unable to approach Greuze's "subject matter" from anything more than purely aesthetic perspective, contrasting Greuze's work with that of Michelangelo in the process. In chapter 31, when Maurice visits Dr Barry, there are copies of Greuze on the walls. Chinese author Xiao Yi mentions Greuze's work The Broken Pitcher throughout the first half of her novel Blue Nails. The Broken Pitcher is also mentioned in the first scene of the Jean-Paul Sartre play, The Respectful Prostitute. Greuze is mentioned in the song "(We All Wear A) Green Carnation", Noël Coward's celebration of camp and queerness, from his 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet:

Sources Normand, J. B. Greuze (1892). Munhall, Edgar. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1725-1805 (1976). Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). ISBN 0-521-55508-6. Gillet, Louis (1913). "Jean-Baptiste Greuze". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dilke, Emilia Francis Strong (1911). "Greuze, Jean Baptiste". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 584–585.