History or Portrait: Greuze verses the Academy.
The history of eighteenth-century French art is filled with various tragedies and failures. For example, in 1736 the royal painter to Louis XV, François Lemoyne suffered a complete breakdown after his wife and his most influential patron died; he committed suicide in his studio.1 The famous painter of young smiling girls, Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) committed another kind of suicide, not a physical one but a career suicide due to his arrogance and his mounting ambition. Greuze’s first major success was his portrait of kinship and money- The Village Bride- which was followed by Filial Piety, a kind of updating of the same family group several years on after the betrothal of the daughter. This was the result of several drawings which spawned a new typology of the “noble” expressive face related in its aquiline bone structure to French physiognomies.2 At a time when sentiment was important, Greuze’s tearful types were appreciated by those connoisseurs and philosophes who thought there was a nobility in such pictures as a Young Woman mourning a Dead Bird (1765), the kind of pathetic and sentimental picture that would become a kind of pictorial sign of Greuze’s art and the audience who valued it. But Greuze’s problems became more evident when he tried to fuse the sensibilité of the portraits with the grand, classical mode of history painting. As Tom Crow said, Greuze was “the artist preparing the final act of the surprise invader, acceptance as a painter of history.”3 But Greuze’s roman family picture, Septimus Severus and Caracalla (1769, above) failed in terms of a passport to the grade of history painter; he was only admitted as a painter of genre, though he is best known for the sentimental images of crying girls and weeping women that grace the walls of places like the Wallace Collection.
1Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France, 57.
2Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth Century Paris (Yale University Press, 1985), 151.
3Ibid, 164.
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