Greuze

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Greuze, by Alys Eyre Macklin
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.
BY ALYS EYRE MACKLIN
ILLUSTRATED WITH EIGHT REPRODUCTIONS IN COLOUR
IN SEMPITERNUM.
LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK NEW YORK: FREDERICK A. STOKES CO.

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.