Greuze

by Harold Armitage

EARLY YEARS

The way of life in which Jean Baptiste Greuze spent his childhood and his youth was not different from that of most other artists. His parents were obscure people, who had no riches; and his father opposed his desire to be a painter.

For many years, even his own countrymen who wrote of Greuze, gave the date of his birth any time between 1725 and 1732; but it is known now that the accurate date is August 21, 1725, the one which has since been inscribed on the modest house in Tournus, near Mâcon, where his father and mother were living when the artist was born.

By the time that Greuze was eight years of age he had manifested a strong inclination towards the use of the pencil. Drawing became his chief amusement; and he employed, indifferently, stray pieces of paper, or whitewashed walls, for the display of his draughtsmanship. His father, as the way of fathers is, had planned for his son a position more exalted than his own in an occupation with which he himself was connected. The elder Greuze was a kind of provincial builder, contractor, and slater; and he wished the younger Greuze to become an architect.

Although it is not apparent why an architect, who to-day undergoes severe discipline in drawing, should be the worse because he had a propensity for sketching, it has yet been stated by some of the biographers of Greuze that the father used persuasions and threats to prevent the son from making drawings, and that the boy was thereby driven to the device of exercising his skill surreptitiously in his bedroom.

But a day came when the father saw the folly of his continued resistance. Mistaking for an engraving a head of St. James which his son had copied with a pen, that he might give it to his father as a birthday present, the elder Greuze was so much impressed by the skill of the lad that he thought it better after all to allow him to have his own way in the choice of a profession; and Greuze therefore became the pupil of Grandon, of Lyons, a portrait painter.

In Grandon's constitution the artist was subservient to the man of affairs; and De Goncourt has written that his studio was a veritable picture factory. Greuze, however, had more elevated notions of the vocation of an artist than to remain content in marking time for the rest of his life as a sort of inglorious piece-worker, and his ambition and self-confidence urged him to Paris, where he believed his powers would win for him both fame and fortune.

In Paris Greuze worked unobtrusively, often in solitude, and earned a precarious livelihood, possibly not without invoking the aid of some of the methods of the master whom he had left in Lyons. He was not immediately successful, and his chance of triumphing over the obstacles which beset a raw youth from the provinces, seeking fame in Paris, seemed to be but a remote one. Yet Pigalle, the king's sculptor, believing that Greuze had the qualities which win success ultimately, encouraged the painter to persevere.

Greuze had, or fancied he had, to contend against the hostility and the jealousy of the other artists. At the Academy, where he went to draw, he received less consideration than his ability merited, and he complained eventually to the artist Silvestre, to whom also he showed some specimens of his work. Silvestre, admiring his skill, wished to have his portrait painted by Greuze, and as Silvestre was a man of some influence, this commission was the means of making Greuze's name more widely known. About this time, too, Greuze attracted attention by one of his representations of scenes from the life of humbler folk than were usually seen in pictures during that period. This painting was L'Aveugle Trompé, and Greuze was made agréé of the Academy on June 28, 1755, either by the good offices of Silvestre or of Pigalle, and thus acquired the right to exhibit his pictures at the annual exhibitions.