This picture shows the living room of a raftered cottage, with the old father sitting at a table round which are gathered his six sons and daughters. One of his large, horny hands is on the open Bible before him, the other holds the spectacles he has taken off as he stops to explain the passage he has been reading. The children listen respectfully, some attentively, the others with an air of being absorbed in their own reflections, while the mother, sitting near, stops her spinning to tell the baby on the floor not to tease the dog.
It is not well painted. Except that it shows a picturesque interior and expresses the sentiment of piety in the home it is intended to convey, it has but little merit, is, indeed, so mediocre that you wonder why, far from bringing fame to the young man, it should have been noticed at all.
To understand its success, and the still greater success of similar pictures which followed, you must glance at the epoch of its production.
CHAPTER II
THE TIMES IN WHICH GREUZE LIVED
It was that period of the eighteenth century before the Revolution when society was at its worst, the paints and powders that covered its face, the scents which over-perfumed its body, its manners artificial as the antics of marionettes, being emblematic of its state of mind. Society was, in short, so corrupt it could not become any more so, and at length, weary of the search for a new sensation, there was nothing for it but a sudden rebound to some sort of morality.
Opportunist philosophers appeared quickly on the scene, and began to preach the pleasant doctrine that man was born very good, full of honesty and good feeling, running over with generosity and all the virtues, and if he did not keep so, it was because the miserable conventions of society had drawn him from the original perfection of his state. To find virtue you must look among those of humble estate, the poor who thought of nothing but their work and the bringing up of their large families. Away, then, from social life and its corruptions, return to the simple ways of the lowly and needy—thus and thus only could France be regenerated!
The aristocratic victims of their caste drank all this in eagerly, and their exaggerated efforts to follow the new cult of simplicity made the bitter-tongued Voltaire describe them as “mad with the desire to walk on their hands and feet, so as to imitate as nearly as possible their virtuous ancestors of the woods.”
Diderot, whose sudden burning enthusiasms and throbbing eloquence would have carried away his hearers in spite of themselves if they had not been only too eager to listen, was the great apostle of the new doctrine, and, always in extremes, he boldly dragged his moral theories into even the realm of art.