It has been urged by Greuze’s admirers that if he had been properly trained, or had at least been spared those early years in Grandon’s picture-manufactory, had been less inclined to listen to flatteries and the advice of Diderot, who praised him for “not making his peasants coarse,” he might have overcome his faults and developed the qualities of a Chardin. The reply to this is that anything touching on genius cannot be held in check or turned from its own full expansion, that it is more than likely that Greuze expressed all he had to say, and himself summed up his own limitations when he said, “Be piquant, if you cannot be true.”
To turn to the much pleasanter theme of his good qualities, Greuze was an innovator. He was the first to go to humble life for inspiration, and he brought into the painting of bourgeois subjects a distinct character till then seen only in historical scenes. He created in France the moral type of painting. On Sundays in the Louvre you still see those who do not understand the beauty of colour, line, and subtler poetry, and find utility the essential condition of all art, lingering admiringly before “La Malédiction paternelle” and “Le Fils puni”; and engravings of similar works are still cherished objects in many a home.
Valuable, too, is his quality of being documentary. He admirably interpreted his age with its superficiality running into theatricalness, its affectations of a morality which worshipped languor and voluptuousness under the name of “Innocence.”
Last and best of all, there are the heads by which we know him. Merely clever in all else, Greuze rises above himself when he approaches these. Nothing could be fresher or more lightly touched than the little blonde heads of his children, the fresh rose of their cheeks, the features suggested under the baby fat, the delicacy of the little unformed members set down with a tenderness that mocks at the limitations of pigments. The same rare quality of livingness animates the older heads. The eyes of the young girls have depth and flame, or their dewy sparkle is subdued in seductive languor. The face almost seems to tremble with emotion while a gleaming tear, a big wet drop, escapes from beneath the heavy lids. The nostrils quiver, the breath comes from between the half-opened mouth, the full lips seem to be making a movement forward. The white flesh is soft and warm, and rich life pulses delicately under the gauze-veiled bosom.
In short, mediocre in all other branches of painting, and affected and faulty at his best, in this exquisite series Greuze not only proves that he possessed a very personal and poetic vision of his own, but that he had a glint of that “divine spark” which sets technique at naught, and results in the instinctive work of the inspired artist.
The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh