GREUZE
Twenty-three paintings represent at the Louvre the art of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), who trod the safe path of flattering the taste of the multitude by the mawkish sentimentality of his genre-pieces and the prettiness and half-concealed sensuality of his “fancy portraits” of young women, which in their suggestiveness are perhaps more insidious than the frank improprieties of Boucher and Fragonard. The sentimental and melodramatic side of Greuze’s art is strikingly revealed in The Village Engagement (No. 369), in The Paternal Curse (No. 370), and in The Punished Son (No. 371), which aroused the enthusiasm of that singularly misguided critic Diderot. But it is the painting of pictures like The Broken Pitcher (No. 372, [Plate XLIII.]), The Milkmaid (No. 372a), and The Dead Bird (No. 372c; a replica of the picture in the Scottish National Gallery), that has made him the idol of a certain undiscriminating section of the public, and established him among the world’s most popular painters.