Background
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was born on August 21, 1725 in Tournus, France, to a prosperous middle-class family. His father was a master-tiler, who wished to make Jean an architect, but ended by leaving him free to follow his own vocation.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was born on August 21, 1725 in Tournus, France, to a prosperous middle-class family. His father was a master-tiler, who wished to make Jean an architect, but ended by leaving him free to follow his own vocation.
Initially, in the late 1740's, Jean-Baptiste studied art in Lyon under the guidance of the portrait painter Charles Grandon. Some time later, about 1750, he attended drawing classes at the Royal Academy in Paris.
In 1755, Jean-Baptiste Greuze first exhibited at the Salon in Paris, where he gained success with his moralizing genre painting, entitled "Father Reading the Bible to His Children". Although Greuze’s attention at this time was fixed on a less-pretentious type of genre painting, in which the influence of 17th-century Dutch masters is apparent, the favourable attention he received, turned his head and established the lines of his future career.
Also, between the years 1755-1757, Greuze traveled in Italy together with Abbé de Chezal-Benoît. He stayed at the French Academy in Rome in 1756-1757 thanks to the intercession of the Marquis de Marigny, a superintendent of buildings for Louis XV. While in Rome, Greuze seemed impervious to an emerging neoclassicism and continued to work on moralizing subjects in a style he had developed in France. Upon returning to France in the late 1750's, he continued to exhibit at the Salon.
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. These works include "The Village Bride", "The Father's Curse" and "The Prodigal Son".
In 1769, the painter was admitted to the Royal Academy in Paris 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). But by that time, he was already famous and could afford to ignore the Salons. Greuze exhibited his works to the public only in his own studio for the next 30 years.
Throughout the 1770's, Jean-Baptiste painted moralizing pictures, but by the 1780's, his work had gone out of fashion and his income was precarious. By 1785, his once-considerable talent was exhausted. The reaction against his sentimental genre paintings resulted in critical neglect of his drawings and portraits, in which Greuze’s superb technical gifts are displayed with great integrity.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was famous for his sentimental genre scenes of peasant life. His most famous works include "La Jeune Fille qui pleure son oiseau mort", "La Bonne Mère", "Le Mauvais fils puni" and "La Malediction paternelle".
Greuze also established a solid reputation as a portrait painter. One of his most insightful studies of a character is the subtle portrait of the academy model Joseph. Other expressive and lively portraits include those of his patron, "Ange-Laurent La Live de Jully", "The Marquise de Bezons Tuning Her Guitar" and "Benjamin Franklin".
Moreover, Jean-Baptiste's impact on the development of French painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries helped ensure the continued popularity and importance of genre painting as a means of conveying moral, psychological and social narratives of everyday life, influencing such painters, as Louis-Léopold Boilly.
Today, the painter's works are kept in the collections of different art institutions and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and others.
In 1769, the painter was admitted to the Royal Academy in Paris as a genre painter.
Denis Diderot, one of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment, hailed Greuze as "the painter of virtue, the rescuer of corrupted morality".
Jean-Baptiste was married and had a daughter, Anna-Geneviève Greuze, who was also a painter. Ultimately, Greuze’s marriage proved to be his downfall, since his wife both cheated on him and embezzled his money before their divorce.
