During the seventeenth century France had not an art of her own. The native painters derived their pictures from Roman or Grecian traditions. They shut their eyes upon the beauties of Nature, painted tedious repetitions of other people's notions, and could not so much as paint their own King, Louis XIV., except as Cyrus or as Alexander!
This period of dulness, pomposity, and general boredom was succeeded by one of light and gaiety, when the joy and the colour of life received recognition. To this consummation the supreme genius of Watteau contributed some of the most exquisite and poetical pictures of all time, and delivered France "from the oppressive yoke of the Italian tradition." Watteau had many imitators, and his style dominated art for many years, but eventually freedom degenerated into license, and even into sheer obscenity. Count Henry Costa, visiting Paris during this period, wrote in a letter to his parents in Savoy: "Greuze, I think, is not partial to Boucher; and rightly loathes the filthiness in fashion now, which desecrates art and ruins morality." Boucher he described as "an old worldling, more dissipated and done up than you can imagine."
It is in the writings of Diderot that one can see, as well as in any other place, an indication that towards the end of the eighteenth century influential people in France were growing more and more studious and serious. The ideas of Rousseau were taking possession of the minds of other people. The nation must study Nature, and discover her laws. Prejudices, authority, tradition, must all be examined in the light of this new idea. Vice must be subdued, artificiality, insincerity, luxury, false refinements, must be swept away, and the people must return to a life of greater simplicity. Man, by nature moral, had been corrupted by civilization, and it was therefore the least civilized who were the least corrupt.
Ideas like these, set forth with the power and the burning zeal of Rousseau, and with the deftness of Diderot, had prepared the minds of the Parisians to receive the genre pictures of Greuze, for to some extent he is an advocate of these ideas in his pictures, seeing that virtues are attributed in a generous measure to the poor and downtrodden of the people.
It is thus that, breaking away from the style of the painters who did little more than pander to the French Court, the pictures of Greuze mark with perfect clearness the beginning of a new tendency which was making itself felt in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adding to the great store of fêtes galantes, and the triumphs of love of the time, Greuze looked for his subjects upon the quays, and boulevards, and market-places, and in the cottages of humble people.
"Courage, my good Greuze," said Diderot of one of Greuze's pictures of domestic drama; "introduce morality into painting. What! has not the palette been long enough, and too long, consecrated to debauchery and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last, united with dramatic poetry, in instructing, correcting us, and inviting us to virtue?"
Living amidst such ideas as these, Greuze founded in France, in the words of De Goncourt, "the deplorable school of the literary painter, and the moralizing artist," or of "that barbaric, story-telling art," as Muther, writing in a similar strain, has described it.
It was this manner of painting that brought out what similarity there is between Hogarth and Greuze, who has been called "a sentimental Hogarth." Like the painter of The Rake's Progress, Greuze told moral tales in a series of pictures in which virtue is exalted and vice abashed, a kind of painting quite different from the pictures which had hitherto been exhibited in Paris. Truly, as Charles Normand has written, "the hour of the reaction against the pastorals and the mythological insipidities of Boucher had sounded. It was Greuze who was the pioneer in the new departure, and he reaped the reward. His fault is that he replaced one convention by another." Hitherto the Court had been all in all, but now had arrived, in the phrase of Charles Blanc, "l'usurpation bourgeoise."
Yet though Greuze thus parted from his predecessors, and, at his best, went along the line of progress towards a study of Nature at first hand, he brought about no violent change such as was seen in England when Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelites broke in upon the complacent mediocrities who represented art in England during early Victorian times.
Though he preached against the ardent sensuality of his era, his own pictures were not wholly free from it, and in the collection at Hertford House his L'Offrande a l'Amour, and particularly La Bacchante, strike no new note amongst the other paintings of the same period. There is not the great difference that would be noticed if an early Millais were to be hung amidst a collection of the works of Maclise, Landseer, Collins, Newton, Leslie, Mulready, and Webster. Greuze did not free France in the same way that the Pre-Raphaelites loosed the bonds of convention and tradition in our own country.