From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Just how far Jean-Baptiste Greuze has fallen from the height of his fame in the second half of the 18th century was made clear by Anita Brookner in her pioneering 1972 biography of the artist. ‘His paintings, with certain exceptions, appear to us tawdry, if not obscene,’ she declared. ‘Clearly he appealed to a vein of feeling that has now become extinct.’ Tawdry because his doe-eyed children and moral scenes of family life appear now to be designed simply to stir cheap emotion; obscene because he used uncomfortably young girls as models for his homilies on lost innocence – for which, read virginity.
To view him as his peers did, when for three decades from 1755 he was the darling of French art, requires mental effort because Brookner’s ‘vein of feeling’ was both short lived and psychologically distant. Greuze (1725–1805) painted for the age of sensibilité, that curious historical moment sandwiched between the ésprit and sometimes libidinousness of the rococo and the muscular, public morality of neoclassicism. It ran parallel to the Age of Reason and sought to replace God-given determinism with a moral code founded on sensation. The result was a conflation of the softer emotions – love, friendship, kinship, kindness, sympathy – with virtue itself.
Among the writers who promulgated this feeling were the Abbé Prévost, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and Samuel Richardson, while in painting the ground was laid by Watteau and Chardin. Greuze’s art therefore emerged into a receptive environment. Some 100 of his paintings, drawings and engravings are now on display in ‘Jean-Baptiste Greuze: Childhood Illuminated’ at the Petit Palais in Paris, a major exhibition that both marks the 300th anniversary of his birth and also seeks to reestablish Greuze’s tumbled reputation by showing that beneath the syrup was seriousness.
Greuze studied at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture where his prickly self-esteem won him few friends. ‘He might have had supporters had he been wise enough to recognise them as his superiors,’ as his niece Madame de Valory put it in her 1813 account of his life. Nevertheless, he submitted five works to the Salon of 1755 and was admitted to the Académie.
He met with instant success: one of those pictures was La Lecture de la Bible (1755), which encapsulates the reasons for his renown. An interior scene, full of detail, it shows a poor but respectable family gathered to listen to the father read a spiritual text. Seven children, from toddler to teen, attend in various attitudes – the youngest is more interested in playing with a dog, others are caught up in the words and imbibing the lesson. It is a painting to reassure Greuze’s bourgeois audience that they need not concern themselves with the ordering of the classes because spiritual, if not material wealth could be found by the humblest in society.
The reception of the painting encouraged Greuze to produce a series of these family admonitions over the next 20 years. In La Dame de Charité (c. 1775) a young mother encourages her hesitant daughter to give a bedridden former soldier a gift of alms; in La Piété filiale (1763) he showed the fruits of beneficent paternity with a father on his deathbed surrounded by his caring family; while a pair of paintings, Le Malédiction paternelle: Le Fils ingrat (1777) and its pendant Le Fils puni (1778), demonstrates what happens in a disordered household when an ungrateful son is cursed by his father and returns years later to find his father’s body still warm on his deathbed.
The one major setback in Greuze’s career came when he projected this theme of fathers and sons on to Roman history. Septimius Severus Reproaching his Son Caracalla for Having Tried to Assassinate Him (1767–69) was both Greuze’s much-delayed submission piece to the Académie and also his attempt to establish himself as a history painter. Based on Poussin’s Death of Germanicus it was a resounding failure: even Diderot, the painter’s friend, thought it contained ‘no magic… no harmony … everything is dull, hard and dry’. The Académie confirmed his acceptance, but only as a genre painter; his Roman work was deemed ‘unworthy’. A furious and humiliated Greuze refused to have anything more to do with the Académie until 1804. Nevertheless, the painting was to prove hugely influential on Jacques-Louis David’s neoclassicism of the 1780s.
Children were always a large part of Greuze’s staffage, hence the exhibition title, and there is little between his portraits of children (his own among them), his têtes d’expression, and the children that populate his genre scenes. Indeed, although there is a cluster of fine portraits in the exhibition, including one of his wife Anne-Gabrielle Babuty that could almost be mistaken for a Nattier (though not one of the Dauphine, a commission he refused saying he was not in the habit of painting ‘plastered faces’), his children are largely generic – all soft-eyes, rosebud mouths, silky hair.
‘Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, feeling that are unique to it; nothing is less sensible than to want to substitute our own,’ wrote Rousseau – and this is what Greuze showed. Indeed, the exhibition devotes a room to his paintings of innocence menaced: a series of young girls, each mourning the death of her pet bird, another with a basket of broken eggs and an expression that makes it clear she is troubled by more than the loss of a few sous, and La Cruche cassée (1771–72), a pre-teen girl by a fountain with a broken pitcher that signifies her as a sexual victim – a message reinforced by an errant nipple poking through her blouse.
As this admirable exhibition shows, the artist’s career was laced with irony. This advocate of the family had mixed fortunes with his own: he sent his children off to wet nurses although he deplored the practice; he fought with his wife – Greuze was like Mr Punch dodging his spouse’s blows, according to a witness – and they divorced in 1793. La Femme en colère of c. 1785 is his pictorial comment on married life. What’s more, as in his own La Pieté filiale, Greuze died in poverty (his wife having embezzled much of his money), but with two of his daughters at his bedside – a tableau mourant that he himself could have painted.
‘Jean-Baptiste Greuze: Childhood Illuminated’ is at the Petit Palais, Paris, until 25 January 2026.
From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.