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 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]
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[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.

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.

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, 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 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.