MASTERPIECES
IN COLOUR

EDITED BY—
T. LEMAN HARE

GREUZE
1725-1805

PLATE I.—L’ACCORDÉE DU VILLAGE. (Frontispiece)

This picture, at first entitled “A Father handing over the
Marriage-portion of his Daughter,” then “The Village Bride,” is
the best of Greuze’s subject pictures. The scene is more or less
naturally arranged, and informed with the tender homely sentiment
inspired by the subject; and the bride, with her fresh young face
and modest attitude, is a delicious figure. It was exhibited in the
Salon of 1761, and now hangs in the Louvre.

GREUZE

BY ALYS EYRE MACKLIN

ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT
REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR

IN SEMPITERNUM.

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg 11]

CHAPTER I
EARLY DAYS AND FIRST SUCCESS

Few names suggest so much beauty as
that of Greuze.

“Greuze”—“a Greuze”—you have only
to hear the word and there rises before your
mental vision a radiant procession of maidens
each lovelier than the last, with the blue of[Pg 12]
a spring sky in their shining eyes, rosy blood
flushing delicate cheeks, soft silken hair
escaping in gold-touched curls at temples
where the blue veins show, lips like dewy
carnations, rounded necks and curving
bosoms that suggest all the sweets of June.
A veritable “garden of girls” in the first
fresh bloom of budding womanhood; and
they come to you not so much as painted
pictures as delicate visions breathed on
canvas from which they might at any
moment tremble into pulsing life.

Yet the Greuze to whom we owe this
exquisite series was first known as the
painter of pictures of a very different kind.
Before speaking of these let us begin at the
beginning, by seeing when and under what
conditions the child who was to become the
poet-painter of a certain type of womanhood
first saw the world he was destined
to enrich.

Born at Tournus, a little town near Macon
in France, on August 21, 1725, the early life
of Jean Baptiste Greuze curiously resembles
in its broad lines those of many other well-known
artists. His parents were humble
people who lived in the tiny house at Tournus,
now decorated with a commemorative plaque;
the father an overman slater; and the godparents,
who play such an important part in
the life of the French child, respectively a
slater and a baker. The father seems to
have been ambitious, for he resolved to take
his son into an evidently expanding business,
not as a workman, but as architect. At the
usual early age, however, the child’s vocation
declared itself. It was in vain the father,
alarmed by symptoms that threatened to disarrange
his plans, took materials from him
and then whipped him for making pictures
all over the walls—anywhere, everywhere.
The boy cared for nothing but drawing of a
kind that did not fall in with the cherished
architectural idea, and after many struggles[Pg 13]
[Pg 14]
[Pg 15]
[Pg 16]
he won the day by giving his father for a
birthday present a pen-and-ink drawing of
the head of St. James, well enough done to
be at first mistaken for an engraving. This
had been copied at nights when he was
supposed to be asleep, and touched and
convinced, the father finally gave in and
sent him off to Lyons to learn the business
in the studio of the painter Grandon.

PLATE II.—L’INNOCENCE TENANT DEUX PIGEONS

“L’Innocence tenant deux Pigeons,” or “Innocence holding
two Pigeons,” is a typical example of the eyes Greuze never tired
of painting, large innocent orbs with a sparkle that suggests the
morning sun on flowers wet with dew. The moist half-open lips
you also find in most of his girl-heads. The lovely colour scheme
is particularly happy even for Greuze. The original is in the
Wallace Collection, London.

The term “learn the business” is used advisedly.
Grandon’s studio was more a manufactory
of pictures than anything else, and
was just as bad a school as a young artist
could well have. Pictures were copied, recopied,
and adapted, turned out for all the
world as Jean Baptiste’s godmother turned
the loaves out of her oven; and while the boy
learnt the use of colours, and some drawing,
he also learnt that facility which is the deadly
enemy of art, artifice rather than invention,
to copy rather than to create—weaknesses
which beset him ever afterwards.

[Pg 17]

It was natural that, when manhood was
arrived at, Greuze should yield to the inevitable
law that draws exceptional talent to
great centres. When he was about twenty
he left Lyons, and with very little capital but
his abilities, his blonde beauty, and a large
stock of self-satisfaction, he set out gaily
to make his fortune in Paris.

The story of the first ten years there is also
the conventional one of early artist days, the
old tale of stress and struggle, of bitter disappointments
alternating with brilliant hopes
and small achievements. Young Greuze was
too personal and faulty in his work to please
the Academy, not strong enough yet to convince
any advanced movement there might
be, and he divided ten trying years between
a little study at the Academy and a great
deal of painting the pot-boilers he had learnt
to make at Lyons. At last his work attracted
the attention and gained for him the friendship
of two well-known artists, Sylvestre,[Pg 18]
and Pigalle, the King’s sculptor, and they
were instrumental in his being able to exhibit
in the Academy of 1755, when he was
thirty years old, the picture which brought
him his first success, “Un Père qui lit la
Bible à ses Enfants.”

This picture shows the living room of a
raftered cottage, with the old father sitting
at a table round which are gathered his six
sons and daughters. One of his large, horny
hands is on the open Bible before him, the
other holds the spectacles he has taken off
as he stops to explain the passage he has
been reading. The children listen respectfully,
some attentively, the others with an air
of being absorbed in their own reflections,
while the mother, sitting near, stops her
spinning to tell the baby on the floor not
to tease the dog.

It is not well painted. Except that it
shows a picturesque interior and expresses
the sentiment of piety in the home it is[Pg 19]
intended to convey, it has but little merit,
is, indeed, so mediocre that you wonder why,
far from bringing fame to the young man,
it should have been noticed at all.

To understand its success, and the still
greater success of similar pictures which
followed, you must glance at the epoch of
its production.

[Pg 20]

CHAPTER II
THE TIMES IN WHICH GREUZE LIVED

It was that period of the eighteenth century
before the Revolution when society
was at its worst, the paints and powders
that covered its face, the scents which over-perfumed
its body, its manners artificial as
the antics of marionettes, being emblematic
of its state of mind. Society was, in short,
so corrupt it could not become any more
so, and at length, weary of the search
for a new sensation, there was nothing for
it but a sudden rebound to some sort of
morality.

Opportunist philosophers appeared quickly
on the scene, and began to preach the pleasant
doctrine that man was born very good,
full of honesty and good feeling, running over[Pg 21]
with generosity and all the virtues, and if he
did not keep so, it was because the miserable
conventions of society had drawn him from
the original perfection of his state. To find
virtue you must look among those of humble
estate, the poor who thought of nothing but
their work and the bringing up of their large
families. Away, then, from social life and its
corruptions, return to the simple ways of the
lowly and needy—thus and thus only could
France be regenerated!

The aristocratic victims of their caste
drank all this in eagerly, and their exaggerated
efforts to follow the new cult of
simplicity made the bitter-tongued Voltaire
describe them as “mad with the desire
to walk on their hands and feet, so as to
imitate as nearly as possible their virtuous
ancestors of the woods.”

Diderot, whose sudden burning enthusiasms
and throbbing eloquence would have
carried away his hearers in spite of themselves[Pg 22]
if they had not been only too eager
to listen, was the great apostle of the new
doctrine, and, always in extremes, he boldly
dragged his moral theories into even the
realm of art.

“To render virtue charming and vice
odious ought to be the object of every honest
man who wields a pen, a paint-brush, or the
sculptor’s chisel,” he declared.

The vivid intelligence of Greuze seized
the position, and sure of at least attracting
attention if nothing else, he set to work to
paint some scene which would fall in with
the prevalent “debauch of morals,” as
some one called it. Thus, “Le Père qui lit
la Bible à ses Enfants” appeared at that
psychological moment which does so much
to ensure success. Further, it came as a
refreshing change to a public weary of the
pleasant insipidities of Boucher, of a long-continued
series of pale pastorals showing
the doubtful pleasures of light love. It was,
[Pg 23]
[Pg 24]
[Pg 25]moreover, a novelty, for no one had painted
such subjects before in France.

PLATE III.—LA MALÉDICTION PATERNELLE

“La Malédiction paternelle,” or “The Father’s Curse,” is in
the Louvre, and is one of the best known of Greuze’s moral pictures.
It is one of his worst productions. Observe the theatrical
attitudes and gestures, the too carefully arranged draperies, etc.,
of the actors in this exaggerated scene, which in real life would
pass in formless disorder and rough confusion.

And so more than the expected happened.
From the day of its exhibition till the Salon
was closed, it was surrounded by admiring
crowds, and every one said, “Who is this
wonderful Greuze?” Those there were who
replied that Greuze had not painted the picture
himself, was incapable of such work, for
the overweening personal vanity that marred
Greuze’s character had already made for him
many enemies; but the happy preacher-painter
proved his position, and but gained
additional interest from the discussions that
raged round him.

From this moment Greuze’s position was
assured. He was made agréé of the Academy,
which among other privileges gave him the
right to exhibit what he liked there in
future. He sold the celebrated picture for a
comparatively large sum to a Monsieur de
la Live de Jully. He made hosts of friends,[Pg 26]
many of them influential. One of his new
acquaintances offered to provide him with a
studio. Another, l’Abbé Gougenot, invited
him to accompany him to Italy to study art,
an offer which was accepted.

Greuze stayed two years in Italy, but except
that some of his pictures have Italian
names and show Italian costumes, this visit
exercised no perceptible influence on his
work, and in 1757 he returned to steady work
in the Paris which was to be for him the
scene of so many triumphs—and later, of so
much despair.

[Pg 27]

CHAPTER III
GREUZE’S MORAL PICTURES

The well-known “Village Bride,” or
“L’Accordée du Village,” exhibited in
1761, was his second great success.

“A Father handing over the Marriage-portion
of his Daughter” was the first title
of this picture, and one which better, if less
poetically, explains the scene. The homely
ceremony takes place in the picturesque
living room of a big cottage or small farm,
and twelve people take part in it. Backed
up by the village functionary, who has drawn
up the contract, the old father is evidently
giving some good advice as he places the
bag of money in the hands of his future son-in-law.
The young man listens respectfully,
the shy but proud young bride hanging on to[Pg 28]
his arm. The mother has taken one of her
daughter’s hands, while a younger sister leans
her head on the bride’s shoulder. Children
play about in various attitudes among a
family of fowls who feed in the foreground.
Though it has some of the faults of those
which followed it, this is undoubtedly the
best subject-picture painted by Greuze. The
composition is good, it is well drawn, full
of a charming tender sentiment, and the
head of the fiancée, foreshadowing Greuze’s
future successes, is delicious, fully deserving
Gautier’s eulogy: “It is impossible to
find anything younger, fresher, more innocent,
and more coquettishly virginal, if the
two words may be connected, than this
head.”

Preaching the beauty of family life, the
sacredness of marriage, and the virtues and
happiness of the humble, “L’Accordée du
Village” raised a furore. Its material success
was equally great. It was sold for 9000[Pg 29]
livres, and later, in 1780, it was bought for
the Cabinet du Roi for 16,650 livres.

Very much less successful from the artistic
point of view were the two well-known pictures
now in the Louvre, which appeared
three or four years later, “La Malédiction
paternelle” and—a sequel—“Le Fils puni.”

The first shows the vicious and debauched
son trying to tear himself from the grasp of
an agonised mother and little brother, to go
away with the colour-sergeant who is waiting
near the door. While the mother pleads,
the father, unable to move from the chair in
which illness holds him, storms, and with
hands violently outstretched, pronounces the
curse that terrifies the other shuddering
members of the family.

The punishment is shown in the second
picture, when the repentant son, shabby and
travel-stained, returns to find his father dead.
His stick fallen from his trembling hands, his
knees giving way beneath him, one hand on[Pg 30]
his heart, the other pressed convulsively to
his forehead, he stands helpless at the foot of
the bed on which the dead man lies. Beside
him stands his mother, pointing tragically to
the corpse, with an air of saying, “Behold
your work!” The other members of the
family are too occupied with their own sorrow
to notice him, and give way to their despair
in various attitudes.

The artificiality of pose and gesture more
than suggested in “L’Accordée du Village” is
here exaggerated into cheap theatricalness.
In “Le Fils puni,” for example, the attitude of
the Prodigal, and the Lady Macbeth pose of
the classically-draped mother, are impossible,
and the outstretched arms, the heaven-turned
eyes, and open mouths of the others are
almost offensive. This exaggeration defeats
its own object. You feel that these
dramatis personæ are only posing, tableau-vivant
fashion, to impress, and they do not
do it well enough to excite anything but[Pg 31]
criticism in you. The colour is bad, heavy,
and dull. The draperies hang in stiff folds,
without suppleness.

These two canvases are arrangements,
not pictures; and in spite of certain gracious
qualities which always charm in Greuze, all
the others of the long series that followed
can be dismissed with the same criticism.

Such was not the opinion of Diderot, the
painter’s most admiring critic and friend.
He could not find words in which to adequately
praise productions that proved such
“great qualities of the heart, and such good
morals.”

“Beautiful! Very beautiful! Sublime!
Courage, my friend Greuze; continue always
to paint such subjects, so that when you
come to die there will be nothing you have
painted you can recall without pleasure.”

“Le Paralytique, ou la Piété filiale,” “Le
Fruit d’une bonne Education,” now in the
celebrated Hermitage Gallery in Russia,[Pg 32]
“La Bénédiction paternelle,” are further examples
of this series of the ten commandments
turned badly into paint and canvas,
and less interesting still are subjects of the
order of “The Torn Will,” falling, as they do,
into the form of the cheapest melodrama.

[Pg 33]

PLATE IV.—PORTRAIT D’HOMME

A very good example of Greuze as a portraitist. This picture
is in the Louvre, and is remarkable for its delicate harmonious
colouring and the living expression in the eyes. The man seems
to be listening to some one, and on the point of opening his mouth
to reply.

[Pg 34]

[Pg 35]

CHAPTER IV
THE PICTURES BY WHICH WE KNOW GREUZE

From time to time during these years
Greuze had painted children’s heads
that gave evidence of the real character of
his talent, and in 1765, the year of “La Malédiction
paternelle,” he produced “Le Baiser
envoyé,” now in London in the collection of
the Baron Alfred de Rothschild.

“Le Baiser envoyé,” or “The Kiss,” represents
a young woman leaning forward
among the flowers of her window-sill to throw
a kiss to her departing lover. The beautiful
form, the charming curved face, all instinctive
with tenderness and longing, the grace of the
attitude, the tapering fingers, the arrangement
of the framing draperies, combine to[Pg 36]
make this one of the most exquisitely graceful
of his pictures, and one that would alone
have proved his surpassing talent for portraying
a certain type of woman. No wonder
the charmed beholders turned to ask each
other whether this moral painter was not
at his best when his subjects were not
moral!

Of course there is nothing immoral about
“The Kiss,” only Greuze had been so praised
for his preacher work, it was only natural he
should be criticised when he produced “La
Voluptueuse,” as he first called this picture.
Of the appropriateness of the title there can
be no doubt. The lovely kiss-thrower absolutely
respires voluptuousness; moreover,
there is hardly a female figure of Greuze,
except those showing very early childhood,
that does not suggest this characteristic.
Even when the eyes of his very young girls
are candid and clear with innocence, the
pouting lips of the half-opened mouths are[Pg 37]
sensuous, the swelling bosom and rounded
throat suggestive, the attitude provoking.
In short, the impression given, if wholly
seductive, is invariably complex, troubled,
full of a certain delicate corruption—see
“Innocence” or “Fidelity” in the Wallace
Collection in London. “A moralist with a
passion for lovely shoulders, a preacher who
wants to see and show the bosoms of young
girls,” is how he has been described.

Not that any one cared. On the contrary,
every one, moralists included, was libertine in
the eighteenth century, and “deshabillé et
désir” only stamped a painter as being the
mirror of his times. So Greuze’s name took
on still more lustre as his rosebuds grew into
roses whose morning dew sparkled beneath
the voluptuousness that began to bow their
lovely heads. “Love-Dreams,” “Bacchantes,”
“Desire,” “Flora,” “Volupté”—there is a
host of canvases bearing similar titles; and
there are many others with symbolic names[Pg 38]
showing girls weeping sentimental griefs
over emblematic objects, such as broken
mirrors, dead birds, crushed flowers, broken
eggs or jars, a kind of badinage that was
the fashion then.

In a way, he had also great success with
his numerous portraits. He never got beneath
the surface, was not psychological
enough to express the soul of his sitter,
but the fleshy envelope he reproduced with
skill. The pictures of his friends Pigalle
and Sylvestre, and an excellent one of the
engraver Wille, whose prints, advertisements,
and praises did so much to extend the Greuze
cult, are well known; and in the vogue that
followed his first success, he received commissions
to paint the Dauphin and other
important personages. In spite of its dull
colour, the portrait of the painter Jeaurat,
now in the Louvre, is an interesting piece
of work, showing characterisation, the brilliant
eyes giving the impression of a man
[Pg 39]
[Pg 40]
[Pg 41]accustomed to observe closely and see most
things. But naturally Greuze was at his best
when he painted women. Very beautiful is
the picture of the Marquise de Chauvelin, at
present in the collection of Baron Alphonse
de Rothschild, and some of his portraits of
his wife justly caused a sensation.

PLATE V.—L’OISEAU MORT

“L’Oiseau Mort,” or “The Dead Bird,” bequeathed by Baron
Arthur de Rothschild to the Louvre, shows one of Greuze’s most
beautiful child-figures, a little girl who has just found her bird
dead. You forget the mannered pose of the hands and arms,
to admire their curves and dimples. The delicacy of the little
grieving face is beyond praise, with the tears starting beneath
the downcast lashes, and a mouth that seems to quiver under
the stir of shadow that plays round it.

To turn for a moment from the artist to
the man, it goes without saying that one
so sensitive to the beauty of woman must
have been susceptible to her influence, and
Greuze’s numerous heart-histories are all the
more interesting in that they are as creditable
to his chivalry as they are romantic.
His first grande passion was his boyish love
for the wife of his master Grandon at Lyons,
a woman with grown-up daughters. He
nursed this adoration in silence, and it was
one of the idol’s daughters who afterwards
told how she once surprised the love-sick
youth passionately kissing one of her
mother’s shoes he had found under a table.

[Pg 42]

Later, when he went to Italy with l’Abbé
Gougenot, there was a love story which in
some of its details recalls the “Romeo and
Juliet” legend. The lovely young daughter
of the proud Duke for whom he was copying
pictures fell in love with the artist,
and declared her passion. The young man
was equally enamoured, but realising the
inequality of their situation he hesitated, and
it was only after the lady pined, fell ill, and
had secret meetings arranged by her old
nurse, that he confessed that the love was
mutual. A period of madness followed, the
lady making plans to take the money her
mother had left her and elope to Paris, where
Greuze was to become a second Raphael;
but his sense of honour triumphed, and to
avoid temptation he feigned an illness which
kept him away from the palace. He really
did fall ill at last, but as soon as he was
able to be up he fled, fearing to see the lady
again. An agreeable, if unromantic sequel[Pg 43]
to the history is a letter he received from
the heroine some years later, thanking him
for having behaved as he had done. She
was now a contented wife and the mother
of some beautiful children, she said, and she
owed all her happiness to him!

Then there is the story of his devotion
to his wife; but unfortunately that will be
told later under a very different heading to
that of “romance.”

[Pg 44]

CHAPTER V
THE VANITY OF GREUZE

Mention has already been made of
the overweening vanity which was
Greuze’s most pronounced personal characteristic.
He had, above all, the highest
possible opinion of his own talent, and could
not brook the slightest adverse criticism of
his work.

Even when he first came to Paris and had
not proved his abilities, he made enemies by
stupid remarks like his reply to Natoire, who
had suggested some alteration in a detail of
one of his pictures. “Monsieur, you would
be only too happy if you were able to do anything
so good yourself.” Later, when success
had come and he was surrounded by admirers,
the desire for praise became a mania, and he[Pg 45]
fell into a violent passion if any one made a
remark that suggested anything but flattery.
A great friend of his, and one of his patrons,
a Madame Geoffrin, at whose house he had
met many of his most influential friends and
kindest critics, said laughingly, and with
truth, that there was a “véritable fricassée
d’enfants” in “La Mère Bien-aimée.” Some
one repeated this to Greuze.

“How dare she venture to criticise a work
of art,” he cried violently. “Let her tremble
with fear lest I immortalise her by painting
her as a schoolmistress, with a whip in her
hand and a face that will terrify all children
living or to be born.”

Under the influence of his infatuation for
himself, he lost all sense of the proportion of
things—witness the scene when the Dauphin,
delighted with his own portrait, asked him to
begin one of the Dauphine. The presence of
the lady did not prevent Greuze, ordinarily
well-mannered, and particularly so to women,[Pg 46]
from replying shortly that he did not know
how to paint heads of the kind, making reference
to the paint and powder all society
women wore at the time. Small wonder
that thereafter royal favours were scarce,
and he had to wait several years longer
than was necessary for the logement in the
Louvre to which his position entitled him.

This same trait played a prominent part
in his historic quarrel with the Academy
over his diploma picture. It was the rule for
every member to present to the Academy on
his election some representative work, but
Greuze, satisfied that the honour was theirs,
and that he was in a position to form his own
precedent, let years go by without offering
the expected chef d’œuvre. It was only
when the delay had lasted fourteen years,
and they wrote saying they would be obliged
to forbid him to show his pictures in the
Salon unless he fulfilled his obligation, that
he conceded to the rule, and having replied[Pg 47]
by a letter that was “a model of pride and
impertinence,” set to work on the picture.

Believing he could do any form of subject
equally well, he chose a grandiloquent historical
subject, a style absolutely unsuited
to his limitations. “Septime Sévère reprochant
à son fils Caracalla d’avoir attenté
à sa vie dans les défilés d’Écosse, et lui
disant, Si tu désires ma mort, ordonne à
Papinien de me la donner” was its title; and
if you look at it where it hangs skied in
the Louvre above the violently outstretched
arms of “La Malédiction paternelle,” you
see that it is a most faulty and insignificant
production. The Academy could not
refuse it, but they told him frankly what
they thought of it.

“Monsieur,” said the Director, calling
him in from the room where he awaited the
congratulations of the associates, whose approval
he believed he had now fully earned,
“the Academy receives you as peintre de [Pg 48]genre. It has taken into account your
former productions, which are excellent, and
has shut its eyes on this one, which is
worthy neither of them nor you.”

The disappointment of Greuze, who had
counted on the dignity and material advantages
conferred by the title of Historical
Painter, can be imagined, but amazement and
fury dominated. For days he could neither
sleep nor eat; and he covered reams of paper
in writing to the papers to prove by technical
laws and logical arguments that the picture
was not only good, but a masterpiece. But
for once the adoring public remained unresponsive.
The last straw was his friend
Diderot’s criticism, published in the usual
way.

“The figure of Septime Sévère is ignoble
in character. It has the dark, swarthy skin
of a convict; its action is uncertain. It is
badly drawn, it has the wrist broken; the
distance from the neck to the breast-bone is
exaggerated. Neither do you see the beginning
of the right knee nor where it goes to
beneath the covering of the bed. Caracalla
is even more ignoble than his father, a
wooden figure, without suppleness or movement.
Those who force their talent do
nothing with grace.”

PLATE VI.—LES DEUX SŒURS

“Les Deux Sœurs,” or “The Two Sisters,” has been until
recently in the private collection of Baron Arthur de Rothschild,
who bequeathed it to the Louvre, where it now hangs. If it lacks
some of the charm of Greuze’s other pictures of girls, it possesses
many of his most charming qualities—delicacy of colouring, graceful
figures, appealing gesture. The arrangement of the scarves
and draperies is essentially “Greuze.”

Having exhausted all other means of protest,
Greuze took refuge in the sulkiness of
a naughty child, and more or less independent
now that he was at last to have the
coveted logement in the Louvre, he declared
he would never again send a picture to the
Academy.

Nor did he, for when, years later, he was
obliged to fall back on its aid, the Academy
as he had known it was swallowed up in the
whirlpool of the Revolution.

[Pg 49]
[Pg 50]
[Pg 51]
[Pg 52]

CHAPTER VI
“THE BROKEN PITCHER” AND OTHER WELL-KNOWN PICTURES

To certain temperaments the associations
of the Louvre are as interesting
as the treasures it actually contains, and
many a dreamer wandering through those
superb galleries must have tried to reconstitute
such scenes as the receptions held
by Greuze when, at the height of his fame,
he was at last in possession of the logement
granted him “for life” by the King in
March 1769.

He was now in the prime of life, and the
village boy had evolved into a handsome
man of middle height, with an impressive
personality and air of distinction. One of[Pg 53]
the two portraits of himself hanging now in
the Louvre must have been painted about
this period. It shows a fine head, full of
energy, both mental and physical, delicate
yet strong, very sensitive, the brilliant
eyes deeply set, the whole face informed
with something akin to, without being
genius. The curved mouth is eloquent,
and we are told his conversation was
sincere, elevated, and animated; but much
nervous irritability is indicated, and a
physiognomist would point significantly to
the exaggerated slope backwards of the
otherwise fine forehead, suggesting a lack
of that reflectiveness which turns keen
perceptions and observation to the best
account.

He was always perfectly dressed, his
manners were elegant, and it soon grew
to be the fashion to visit his studio. He
used to show his pictures himself, explaining
their beauties, and his extravagant remarks,[Pg 54]
absorbed as he was in himself
and his work, sometimes provided more
entertainment than the legitimate raison
d’être of the visit. All the talent and
beauty of Paris, the greatest nobles, royalties,
and distinguished travellers were at
one time or another his guests. In a
characteristic letter to a friend, Madame
Roland describes her visit to see “The
Broken Pitcher” we all know so well by
reproductions. The original is back in the
Louvre now.

After speaking of the lovely colouring,
fresh and charming, she says: “She holds
the jar she has just broken in her arms,
standing near the fountain where the accident
has taken place. Her eyelids are low,
and the mouth still half-open, as she tries
to understand the gravity of her misfortune
and does not know whether she is to blame.
One can imagine nothing more piquant and
pretty; the only reproach the painter merits[Pg 55]
is that he has not made the little girl sorry
enough to no longer feel the temptation
to return to the fountain. I said this to
Greuze, and we laughed together.” With
good-natured malice Madame Roland goes
on to relate how when Greuze told her the
Emperor Joseph II. had complimented him
on the personal quality of his work, saying
he was the poet of his pictures, she replied,
“It is true one never quite understands how
beautiful your pictures are till you describe
them.” A remark which Greuze took quite
seriously.

The “Danæ,” now in the Louvre, and
“L’Offrande à l’Amour,” in the Wallace Collection,
are also mentioned in correspondence
as having been shown by Greuze
in his studio about this time. They are
the best examples of his allegorical work—there
was no branch of painting he did not
attempt—but they are hardly more successful
than his moral subjects, and quite[Pg 56]
lack the charm of his homely, familiar
scenes.

Chief among the latter may be mentioned
“La paix du Ménage,” a young father and
mother clasping each other tenderly as they
watch their sleeping child; “La Mère Bien-aimée,”
whose pretty head comes out of a
crowd of the clambering children, who excited
Madame Geoffrin’s ill-received remark;
“Le Gouter,” a young mother feeding her
two fat little boys with a spoon, while a cat
sits on the table watching enviously; “Le
Silence,” in which the mother, nursing one
child, tells an unhappy older one not to
blow his trumpet in case he wakes the babe
in the cradle. Greuze was never tired of
painting mothers with their little children,
and the picturesque interiors in which he
places them are perhaps more charming
than the figures, showing, as they do, the
old-world utensils and objects he had
round him in his own childhood. The oddly-shaped[Pg 57]
cradle which he reproduced so often
was that in which he himself had been
rocked.

Very celebrated at the time were the
companion pictures, “L’Enfant envoyé en
Nourrice” and “Le Retour de Nourrice.” The
first scene is laid in the quaint courtyard of
a little thatched farm, with all the family
clustering round the mule on which the
foster-mother is to carry away the baby. The
composition is charming, with the foster-father
arranging the saddle, the grandmother
giving a last word of advice to the young
nurse, the two little children afraid of the
strange dog, and the mother giving a last
kiss to the baby she would give much not
to have to part with. The return of the
baby, now a sturdy child on his feet, is
set in the interior, where the little hero of
the occasion struggles away from his eager
mother and the brother who strives to amuse
him, to return to the foster-mother. These[Pg 58]
are the least affected of all the subject-pictures.
With the exception of the foster-father,
who stands in the second one with
a cradle on his back and his eyes piously
uplifted to the rafters, all the actors seem
absorbed in what they are doing, and this
sincerity accentuates the grace and sentiment
which always informs Greuze’s work.

Engravings of all these canvases, of all
his work, were sent out in their thousands.
He was well known in Germany
and other countries, and his name was
almost as familiar in the bourgeois homes
of provincial France as in Paris.

Seeing him at this period of his career,
the pet of princes, and earning vast sums of
money, it is difficult to realise Greuze could
ever have fallen on evil days, have come to
actual want. Yet so it was to be.

The visit of the Emperor Joseph II. referred
to by Madame Roland, and followed
by a command for a picture, a present of 4000
ducats, and the conferring of the title of
baron on the painter, was the high-water
mark in his career. And the tide of success
was not only to turn, but to recede
with tragic rapidity.

[Pg 59]
[Pg 60]
[Pg 61]
[Pg 62]

PLATE VII.—LA CRUCHE CASSÉE

“La Cruche Cassée,” or “The Broken Pitcher,” is too well
known in every form of reproduction to need description. It
hangs in the Louvre, and is always surrounded by eager copyists,
who strive, very frequently in vain, to reproduce the delicate tints
of the flesh and the vague, wondering expression in the eyes of
the charming heroine.

CHAPTER VII
RUIN AND DEATH

Even during these brilliant days, when
Greuze was considered the most fortunate
of mortals, there lurked beneath the
glittering surface of his life a grim reality
which made happiness impossible, the misery
of a private life dominated by as bad a wife
as ever cursed a man’s existence.

She was a Mademoiselle Babuty, daughter
of a bookseller on the Quai des Augustins,
and entering the little shop to buy some
books, Greuze became infatuated with her
beauty. “White and slender as a lily, red
as a rose,” is how Diderot describes her, and
though she was past thirty when Greuze
made her acquaintance, she must have been
a remarkably pretty woman, with a round,[Pg 63]
smooth forehead, eyes full of naïveté beneath
long shadowing lashes, small nose, moist
lips, delicate complexion. A sentimental,
coquettish air redeemed what would otherwise
have been an inane expression. In the
portraits under her own name, and several
pictures for which she posed, such as “La
Mère Bien-aimée” and “La Philosophie endormie,”
you see that if she was not the
actual model, she was certainly the ideal
that inspired most of Greuze’s best work.

At first he had no intention of marrying
her, and they had known each other two or
three years before she practically compelled
him to do so by threatening to kill herself
if he did not make her his wife. It was a
disastrous marriage. Lazy, greedy, extravagant,
devoid of all moral sense, she soon got
over the satisfaction the position of her husband
gave her, and began to regard his
work merely as a means to supply her
caprices. When she had been married a few[Pg 64]
years she sent her two little girls away to
school, and going from bad to worse, ended
by filling the house with vulgar men, who
made Greuze ridiculous. Her business training
fitted her to keep the monetary accounts
of the family, and when at length her husband
was obliged to look into them to try to account
for the disappearance of vast sums of money,
he found she had been squandering them
on her dissolute friends. The extent of her
audacity can be judged by her accounting for
the disappearance of 100,000 livres by saying
she had invested it in a ship which had
gone down at sea, and she refused to give
the name of the vessel or captain.

Of all that freedom of mind and internal
peace so important to all successful work,
but supremely so to the artist whose creations
are to be strong, Greuze knew nothing.
Petty discussions, foolish quarrels,
then grievous wrongs and personal violences,
made up the background of his life, and it is[Pg 65]
astonishing that the trials of man and husband
did not sap the strength of the artist.
You would wonder why he supported it all so
long did you not know that the artistic temperament
finds the most important part of
its life in its work, and falls an easy prey to
imposition in most things outside it. Besides,
at first he loved her very sincerely, and she
was the mother of his two daughters. At
length, when cartoons were printed ridiculing
her lightness, and her husband for supporting
it, and her behaviour was instrumental in his
having to resign his logement in the Louvre,
even Greuze’s patience gave way, and in
1785 a deed of separation enabled him to
get rid of her.

Considering the large sums commanded
by his pictures—and it was said he painted
one a day—and the vast sale of the engravings,
it is unlikely, even with a vicious
wife’s extravagance, Greuze could ever have
known want in the ordinary course of events.[Pg 66]
But the terrible days of the Revolution were
at hand. Bank after bank failed, and slowly
but surely all his savings had vanished.
With the fall of the monarchy, the annual
pension of 1500 livres granted by the King
for thirty-seven years of work in “an art he
had exercised with success” went, and finally
he was reduced to what he was producing as
a means of living. But, alas, when from chaos
anything like order arose, and Greuze, now
grown old, sent to the Salon of the year VIII.
seventeen works of the kind that had earned
for him so much glory in the past, the new
order of things knew him not. The risen
David was the god of the moment, and at
each new picture of his a little more scorn
fell on those who had preceded him.

It was in vain that he wrote to the papers,
calling attention, as of old, to the moral
meaning of his work; in vain that he tried
to fall in with new ideas and paint classical
scenes like his “Ariadne at Naxos.” Any[Pg 67]
notice he received was worse than none,
and two years before he died he was cruelly
summed up by a critic who wrote: “Greuze
is an old man inspired by Boucher, whom he
followed. His colour is not true, his drawing
poor.” We hear of his receiving 175 francs for
a picture that would formerly have brought
him thousands of livres; we hear of his wearing
shabby frayed clothes he could not afford
to replace. Finally, there are pitiful letters,
one asking for an advance on a picture
ordered out of charity, another saying, “I am
seventy-five years old, and have not a single
order for a picture. I have nothing left but
my talent and my courage.”

In these days of bitter neglect and dire
poverty Greuze’s pride stood him in good
stead. He seems to have worried more at
the prospect of leaving his daughters unprovided
for than because of his own privations,
and till the last he kept the indomitable
spirit that characterised him. “Who is king[Pg 68]
to-day?” he would ask sarcastically, as he
lay in bed waiting for the end.

“I am ready for the journey,” he said
to his friend Barthélemy, just before he
died. “Good-bye. I shall expect you at
my funeral. You will be all alone there,
like the poor man’s dog.”

Worn out as much by the heavy weight
of a dead reputation as by the years his
robust country constitution enabled him to
carry so lightly, he died on March 21, 1805.
The humble funeral, followed by two persons,
would have been tragic in its friendlessness
but for the message of hope written on a
wreath of Immortelles placed on his coffin
by a weeping woman closely veiled in black.

“These flowers, offered by the most
grateful of his pupils, are the emblem of
his glory.”

[Pg 69]

PLATE VIII.—LA LAITIÈRE

“La Laitière,” or “The Milkmaid,” may perhaps be given as
quite the most representative of Greuze’s works. The affected
pose and simpering smile, the unsuitability and over-arrangement
of the dress, are as characteristic of the painter as the perfect grace
of the ensemble, the delicious coquetry of the attitude, the dimpled
roundness of the form, and, above all, the sparkle in the clear
eyes and the exquisite bloom of the flesh. The picture is in the
Louvre.

[Pg 70]

CHAPTER VIII
THE ART OF GREUZE

When you think of the important
place held by Greuze before the
Revolution in the art of the eighteenth century,
above all, when you reflect on how,
being long dead, he still speaks in accents
of such beauty, his pictures, valued at vast
sums, finding honoured places in the art
treasure-houses of the world, it comes almost
as a shock to consider how far from being
a really great artist he was.

Absence of sincerity is his chief fault.
We read he used to talk much and very
eloquently about studying Nature, and had
at one time a habit of wandering about the
streets in search of subjects, that he used
even to make sketches and studies on the[Pg 71]
[Pg 72]
spot, but once home and at work on the
composition of the picture, he evidently gave
rein to the libertine imagination we know.
In short, if he really Saw, he Interpreted his
own way, and that way resulted in his eliminating
all the Strength and most of the Truth.
In the theatrical moral pictures, for example,
it never seems to have occurred to him that
each scene that would tell a story is composed
of a whole series of emotions and gestures,
and that to try to fix on one canvas a situation
which of its nature must be mobile and
composed of many changes, is to attempt
the false as well as the impossible. Further,
even taking him as Diderot’s disciple, “a
painter who studied with a literary man,”
he is grievously at fault, for the idea of life
he conveys is that of a melodrama in which
vice is invariably punished and virtue rewarded—and
life is not thus.

He took liberties with Nature, too, when
he supposedly copied his homely, familiar[Pg 73]
scenes direct from life. His peasant women
take on attitudes and smirk as they feed the
carefully placed children; no sweeping or
labour of any sort seems to soil the hands
of the busiest housewife; clinging children
never succeed in disarranging the garments
or hair of the mothers and nurses. By no
stretch of the imagination could you see his
milkmaids delivering milk; his servants look
like ladies “making believe.” The attitudes
of all his dramatis personæ are always
affected, the naïveté of his girls and children
mannered, their pathos conventional. Tears
never redden their eyes; no emotion disarranges
the kerchief carefully arranged to
show more than is necessary of the throat
and breast. And the head of a child of
twelve is often placed on the throat and
bosom of a girl of seventeen.

Except when he touches flesh his colour
is rarely good, the scheme too grey, with
undecided reds, dull violets, dirty blues, and[Pg 74]
muddy foundations. The draperies are often
badly painted, a fault which he explained by
saying he purposely neglected them to give
more value to the painting of the flesh.

Then there is his monotony. No painter
ever copied himself with more constancy and
indefatigability. He has but three or four
types, and these he copies and recopies till
you never want to see them again. The
father is always the same venerable man,
much too old to be the father of such young
children; the mother does not vary; it is
always the same child a size or two smaller
or larger, as the case may be. Although he
nominally gives to his girls and women a
profession by labelling them washerwomen,
knitters, philosophers, chesnut-sellers, kitchen
wenches, and so forth, they all have the air
of being members of one family, and striking
likenesses at that. And one and all have the
appearance of posing in light opera rather
than of playing a part in life. The peasant[Pg 75]
mothers of large families have that charming
coquettishness which is the hall-mark
of every female he painted. The picturesque
interiors are equally wanting in variety.

It has been urged by Greuze’s admirers
that if he had been properly trained, or had
at least been spared those early years in
Grandon’s picture-manufactory, had been less
inclined to listen to flatteries and the advice
of Diderot, who praised him for “not making
his peasants coarse,” he might have overcome
his faults and developed the qualities of a
Chardin. The reply to this is that anything
touching on genius cannot be held in check
or turned from its own full expansion, that
it is more than likely that Greuze expressed
all he had to say, and himself summed up his
own limitations when he said, “Be piquant,
if you cannot be true.”

To turn to the much pleasanter theme of
his good qualities, Greuze was an innovator.
He was the first to go to humble life for[Pg 76]
inspiration, and he brought into the painting
of bourgeois subjects a distinct character
till then seen only in historical scenes. He
created in France the moral type of painting.
On Sundays in the Louvre you still
see those who do not understand the beauty
of colour, line, and subtler poetry, and find
utility the essential condition of all art,
lingering admiringly before “La Malédiction
paternelle” and “Le Fils puni”; and
engravings of similar works are still cherished
objects in many a home.

Valuable, too, is his quality of being documentary.
He admirably interpreted his age
with its superficiality running into theatricalness,
its affectations of a morality which worshipped
languor and voluptuousness under
the name of “Innocence.”

Last and best of all, there are the heads
by which we know him. Merely clever in
all else, Greuze rises above himself when he
approaches these. Nothing could be fresher[Pg 77]
or more lightly touched than the little blonde
heads of his children, the fresh rose of their
cheeks, the features suggested under the
baby fat, the delicacy of the little unformed
members set down with a tenderness that
mocks at the limitations of pigments. The
same rare quality of livingness animates the
older heads. The eyes of the young girls
have depth and flame, or their dewy sparkle
is subdued in seductive languor. The face
almost seems to tremble with emotion while
a gleaming tear, a big wet drop, escapes
from beneath the heavy lids. The nostrils
quiver, the breath comes from between
the half-opened mouth, the full lips seem
to be making a movement forward. The
white flesh is soft and warm, and rich life
pulses delicately under the gauze-veiled
bosom.

In short, mediocre in all other branches
of painting, and affected and faulty at his
best, in this exquisite series Greuze not only[Pg 78]
proves that he possessed a very personal
and poetic vision of his own, but that he
had a glint of that “divine spark” which
sets technique at naught, and results in the
instinctive work of the inspired artist.

The plates are printed by
Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh