Jean-Baptiste Greuze (Tournus, August 21, 1725 - Paris, March 4, 1805) was a French painter and draftsman.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze's Biography
Greuze was, like Antoine Watteau, the son of a roofer, Jean Louis Greuze and Claudine Roch.
After being a pupil of the painter Charles Grandon in Lyon, he moved in 1750 to Paris, where he was a pupil of Charles-Joseph Natoire at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (which would merge into the Académie des beaux-arts in 1816).
In 1755, his Family Father explaining the Bible to his children was a great success. His popularity grew with other paintings with strong sentimental and melodramatic overtones, so in keeping with the taste of the time that Diderot praised him for the morality of his subjects.
A regular presence at exhibitions, his fame transcended the frontier, reaching as far as Russia, where Empress Catherine II bought The Filial Pieta/The Paralytic, one of his most famous paintings currently in the Hermitage Museum, and regarded as the sequel to his masterpiece L'accordée de village (The Village Engagement) on view in the Louvre.
He painted numerous portraits and over time moved toward more allusive and libertine themes (one of his recurring themes is the loss of virginity, as in La cruche cassée), which earned him criticism. He also tried his hand at allegorical (L'offrande à l'amour, 1769), mythological and religious themes, but without convincing.
To gain access to the Académie, Greuze submitted in 1769 the large canvas Septimius Severus rebukes Caracalla for making an attempt on his life. He was accepted, however, not as a historical painter "à la Poussin," but as a genre painter.
This was a great displeasure to him, and from then on he stopped exhibiting in public Salons, setting up a private one in his studio, which became fashionable and very well attended: Gustavus III of Sweden, among others, passed there in 1771 and, in 1777, Benjamin Franklin and also the queen's brother, Emperor Joseph II.
After the Revolution Greuze's work went completely out of fashion, and he had to live on lectures. In 1792 he met Napoleon Bonaparte, it is not known under what circumstances, but probably in conjunction with the taking of the Tuileries, and drew what later became the first known portrait of the future emperor.
The painter kept the drawing in his room as personal property until his death, and so did his daughter.
In 1803 he was commissioned to paint a final large portrait of Napoleon in First Consul's outfit (still in the Château de Versailles Museum), which was largely done by his studio (and his daughter) by taking the face from the youthful portrait. However, this did not prevent him from dying in poverty just two years later, in 1805.
A Freemason, he was a member of the Parisian lodge "Les Neufs Soeurs," of the Grand Orient of France..
Style and production of Jean-Baptiste Greuze
His depictions of children and portraits are conventional but interesting: Babuti, le Dauphin, Fabre d'Églantine, Fillette soulevant un coffre, Gensonné, Le Graveur Wille, La Liseuse, Le Libraire Babuti, Madame Greuze, Marquise de Chauvelin, Pigalle, Silvestre, Tête de garçon, Wille, Robespierre.
A better draughtsman than colorist, Greuze produced excellent depictions of maidens in which innocence and eroticism could mingle: see Jeune Femme au chapeau blanc (1780). He was a skilled painter of composition, but the excess of theatrical gestures, swooning and delirium makes his moralizing canvases often monotonous and prone to the trap of sentimentality.
Many of his works are in the Louvre Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Fabre Museum, the Condé Museum, and the Museum of Tournus, his hometown.