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 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 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 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 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, “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.