Greuze

by Alys Eyre Macklin

From time to time during these years Greuze had painted children’s heads that gave evidence of the real character of his talent, and in 1765, the year of “La Malédiction paternelle,” he produced “Le Baiser envoyé,” now in London in the collection of the Baron Alfred de Rothschild.

“Le Baiser envoyé,” or “The Kiss,” represents a young woman leaning forward among the flowers of her window-sill to throw a kiss to her departing lover. The beautiful form, the charming curved face, all instinctive with tenderness and longing, the grace of the attitude, the tapering fingers, the arrangement of the framing draperies, combine to make this one of the most exquisitely graceful of his pictures, and one that would alone have proved his surpassing talent for portraying a certain type of woman. No wonder the charmed beholders turned to ask each other whether this moral painter was not at his best when his subjects were not moral!

Of course there is nothing immoral about “The Kiss,” only Greuze had been so praised for his preacher work, it was only natural he should be criticised when he produced “La Voluptueuse,” as he first called this picture. Of the appropriateness of the title there can be no doubt. The lovely kiss-thrower absolutely respires voluptuousness; moreover, there is hardly a female figure of Greuze, except those showing very early childhood, that does not suggest this characteristic. Even when the eyes of his very young girls are candid and clear with innocence, the pouting lips of the half-opened mouths are sensuous, the swelling bosom and rounded throat suggestive, the attitude provoking. In short, the impression given, if wholly seductive, is invariably complex, troubled, full of a certain delicate corruption—see “Innocence” or “Fidelity” in the Wallace Collection in London. “A moralist with a passion for lovely shoulders, a preacher who wants to see and show the bosoms of young girls,” is how he has been described.

Not that any one cared. On the contrary, every one, moralists included, was libertine in the eighteenth century, and “deshabillé et désir” only stamped a painter as being the mirror of his times. So Greuze’s name took on still more lustre as his rosebuds grew into roses whose morning dew sparkled beneath the voluptuousness that began to bow their lovely heads. “Love-Dreams,” “Bacchantes,” “Desire,” “Flora,” “Volupté”—there is a host of canvases bearing similar titles; and there are many others with symbolic names showing girls weeping sentimental griefs over emblematic objects, such as broken mirrors, dead birds, crushed flowers, broken eggs or jars, a kind of badinage that was the fashion then.

In a way, he had also great success with his numerous portraits. He never got beneath the surface, was not psychological enough to express the soul of his sitter, but the fleshy envelope he reproduced with skill. The pictures of his friends Pigalle and Sylvestre, and an excellent one of the engraver Wille, whose prints, advertisements, and praises did so much to extend the Greuze cult, are well known; and in the vogue that followed his first success, he received commissions to paint the Dauphin and other important personages. In spite of its dull colour, the portrait of the painter Jeaurat, now in the Louvre, is an interesting piece of work, showing characterisation, the brilliant eyes giving the impression of a man accustomed to observe closely and see most things. But naturally Greuze was at his best when he painted women. Very beautiful is the picture of the Marquise de Chauvelin, at present in the collection of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, and some of his portraits of his wife justly caused a sensation.

PLATE V.—L’OISEAU MORT

“L’Oiseau Mort,” or “The Dead Bird,” bequeathed by Baron Arthur de Rothschild to the Louvre, shows one of Greuze’s most beautiful child-figures, a little girl who has just found her bird dead. You forget the mannered pose of the hands and arms, to admire their curves and dimples. The delicacy of the little grieving face is beyond praise, with the tears starting beneath the downcast lashes, and a mouth that seems to quiver under the stir of shadow that plays round it.

To turn for a moment from the artist to the man, it goes without saying that one so sensitive to the beauty of woman must have been susceptible to her influence, and Greuze’s numerous heart-histories are all the more interesting in that they are as creditable to his chivalry as they are romantic. His first grande passion was his boyish love for the wife of his master Grandon at Lyons, a woman with grown-up daughters. He nursed this adoration in silence, and it was one of the idol’s daughters who afterwards told how she once surprised the love-sick youth passionately kissing one of her mother’s shoes he had found under a table.