Greuze, Jean-Baptiste (zhäN bätēst` gröz), 1725–1805, French genre and portrait painter. He studied at the Académie Royale and won recognition in 1755 with his Blind Man Deceived. He traveled in Italy and on his return painted a series of popular realistic pictures of a dramatic and moralizing character—The Village Bride, The Father's Curse, The Wicked Son Punished, The Broken Pitcher (all: Louvre). His artificial, often slightly prurient compositions are less interesting to modern taste than his portraits, which include one of his wife called The Milkmaid (Louvre) and those of the dauphin, Robespierre, and Napoleon (all: Versailles). A superb draftsman, he also created hundreds of fine drawings. In the Revolution Greuze lost both fortune and popularity, and died in poverty. Examples of his work are in such collections as the Louvre, London's Wallace Collection, the Edinburgh National Gallery, and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Bibliography

See study by A. Brookner (1972).

Greuze, Jean-Baptiste

(born Aug. 21, 1725, Tournus, Fr.—died March 21, 1805, Paris) French painter. He studied at the Royal Academy in Paris. His first exhibited painting, The Father Reading the Bible to His Children, won him immediate success at the Salon of 1755. Throughout the 1760s he won acclaim with such sentimental works as The Village Betrothal (1761) and Prodigal Son (c. 1765). Hoping to gain admission to the academy as a history painter, he submitted a large historical work; when it was rejected, he refused to exhibit anywhere but his own studio for 30 years. He earned a living with morality pictures and images of young women in innocent disarray, but in time his popularity waned. The reaction against his sentimental genre paintings resulted in critical neglect of his drawings and portraits, which display great technical gifts.