Greuze, it is true, made sketches for his pictures in the streets and in the market-places; but there is none of the freshness of the sketch when the figure appears on the canvas, and De Goncourt has complained that little tatterdemalions with their split breeches have become on their way to Greuze's canvases the Cupids of Boucher dressed as Savoyards; and further, he has put in a mild demurrer that the artist's washerwomen do not wash!
In strong contrast to Greuze's melodramatic, affected, domestic scenes are those by Chardin, another French artist of the eighteenth century. No ethical teaching is obtruded in his pictures; there is no pose, and the spectator can enjoy the real poetry of life, the sweetness and simplicity of well-ordered homes, undisturbed by the poseurs who clamour for our regard in many of the pictures by Greuze.
THE PRETTY LAUNDRESS.
(La Belle Blanchisseuse.)
Another fault of Greuze's genre pictures is their poverty and feebleness of colour. There is a general deadness, and in parts an abuse of purple and violet. Some of the tints have a dirty muddled look, and the shadows are heavy and brown. Still the chief fault is that art in these pictures is relegated to a second place; the pictures are a means, and not an end.
To see many of his genre pictures together is to receive an impression of monotony. It is clear that the range of the artist is narrow, that he is making a few ideas cover a great area of canvas, and that he ceased to grow intellectually at an early stage of his career.
Greuze and Hogarth have often been compared, but there are many essential differences between the two men. There was dissimilarity in their temperaments, and while Greuze has adopted the attitude of a mild-mannered Sabbath-school superintendent, towards those whose immorality he would correct, Hogarth, as Professor Muther has written, has "swung over this human animal the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritan bourgeois." Charles Normand explains the difference with some disregard for international amenity. Greuze, he says, "did not paint for the English, at once drunkards and theologians, maundering on through life, with a pot of gin in one hand and a Bible in the other."
And yet Greuze is no Puritan, even when he preaches most. There is often an air of coquetry and voluptuousness in his most serious pictures. Charles Blanc has written that Greuze is a moralist who is passionately fond of beautiful shoulders, a preacher who loves to see and to reveal to us the bosoms of young girls; and Lady Dilke has pointed out that "even in Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants ... the instinct which bade him associate with his lessons of grace and morality the stimulus of voluptuous charm has tempted him to give prominence to the girl whose thoughts are far away, and whose kerchief is torn just where it should hide the budding breast."
But when criticism has said all it can say in dispraise of Greuze's pictures, even of his genre pictures, it may be seen that Greuze was by temperament an artist. The melodramatic moralist was only part of the man and not the whole. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had "something of the Shorter-Catechist" in his constitution, and yet remains the most romantic and interesting figure of the latter-day world of letters.