The Rise Of French Painting

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Contemporary with Fragonard was a painter, who, though never the equal of Chardin as a craftsman, nevertheless approached him in the democratic temper of his art. Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), who was born near Macon and came to Paris in 1746, suddenly acquired fame and popularity when he was thirty by exhibiting at the Salon of 1755 his picture ‘A Father Explaining The Bible to his family.’ This familiar scene, with its everyday details and its personages taken from humble life, made an immediate appeal to the bourgeois, who found in it those new ideas of simplicity and morality which Jean Jacques Rousseau had spread among the middle classes. Lady Dilke, who evidently suspected the moral sincerity of Greuze, pronounced his pictures to be ‘stained by artificiality.’ His pictures were rendered attractive, she argued, by a ‘vein of wanton suggestion which found an echo in the dainty disorder in which his heroines are dressed.’

There are some strange parallels between the life of Greuze and that of Watteau, who died four years before his birth. Greuze’s father was also a carpenter, and he also opposed his son’s determination to become an artist. Greuze also began his career in extreme poverty, but fortunately he had a more robust constitution and withstood hardship better than Watteau. Greuze’s father whipped him when he caught him drawing, and Grueze also ran away to Paris with another painter, and he, too, when he got there found that nobody wanted to give him any employment. Both men were close on thirty before the turning point came, Watteau by his election to the Academy, and Grueze by the exhibition of his picture at the Salon. But there the parallel ends, and the close of Greuze’s life is more like that of Fragonard. For he also outlived his popularity and died in poverty.

It seems extraordinary that Grueze, the most popular of painters at all times, should have fared so badly at the end of his life. We cannot account for it by saying that Greuze could not accommodate himself to the change of taste brought about by the French Revolution, for throughout his career he was distinctly a bourgeois rather than an aristocratic painter. No, we must seek another explanation.

The miserable truth is that the seemingly sweet and innocent little person, who looks out at us continually from those pictures of girl’s heads which have brought the painter his greatest posthumous fame, was the cause of her immortaliser’s wretched end. To look at all the portraits of her which hang in the Wallace Collection, or at the one entitled ‘Girl Looking Up,’ which is in the National Gallery, is to find it difficult to believe that the original was an arrant little baggage. Yet some people, who profess to be judges of character, say that the Greuze girl is not so innocent as she pretends to be.

The historic truth is that she was the daughter of an old bookseller on the Quai des Augustins, Paris, and Greuze is said to have married her to save her reputation. He married Anne Gabriel in haste, and he repented at his leisure. Owing to her husband’s constant exposition of her charms, Madame Greuze became one of the noted beauties of the day, and though her husband was devoted to her and gave her crazily everything he could that she wanted, the ungrateful little hussy repaid him by robbing him not only of his peace of mind but of large sums of money that he had saved.

It is easy to be wise after the event, and Mr John Rivers in his book on Greuze and his Models maintains that every feature of Anne Gabriel ‘announced a hasty, passionate, and rather voluptuous nature’; nevertheless we are inclined, as human beings ourselves liable to error, to give our sympathy to Greuze and praise him for a generous and chivalrous action rather than to condemn him for having made an imprudent marriage. Though he painted other beautiful women, it is by his various fanciful portraits of his erring wife that Greuze has obtained his worldwide popularity, and there is hardly another instance in art of a painter who has achieved so great a fame by his exposition of the physical charms of a single model.