Popular as was this picture of L'Aveugle Trompé, its success was eclipsed by the fame of Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants, a work which advanced Greuze to the front rank of the leading painters of that time. Even when one remembers that this is a better picture than many which he painted afterwards, it is yet not easy to-day to understand the enthusiasm that it caused when it was first exhibited. One reason for our difficulty is that we do not feel the force of its novelty as the people of Paris felt it when they had become satiated with the painted pastorals, allegories, and coquetries of that voluptuous era.
The picture, pleasing as a whole, contains indications of the tendency towards artificiality which afterwards became so marked in many of Greuze's melodramatic paintings. But for the rest the scene is nature in a mirror compared with other canvases of the same century. The painter has represented the interior of a farm kitchen, and a devout and venerable farmer reads, from a large Bible, some chapters of the New Testament to the other members of the household. All these, from the grandmother to the child of three years, are picturesque and pleasing, and they are happily placed in the picture. This work was bought by Monsieur de la Live de Jully, a rich connoisseur, who invited artists and others interested in painting to go to his house, to see the new kind of picture which Greuze had introduced into Paris.
Even from artists and critics the picture won a generous meed of praise; but, containing as it does all the elements which still appeal to "the man in the street," it was not until 1755, when it was exhibited at the Salon, that it achieved its greatest triumph. As long as the exhibition was open the people crowded round this pious presentment of humble life which had strayed so unaccountably amongst the pictures of the Court painters—pictures which for many years, as we shall see, had been free from the suspicion of any odour of sanctity.
"Whence comes he? Whose pupil is he?" asked the bewildered Academicians, who, in the manner of Academicians, could not believe it possible for an artist outside their circle to attain either excellence or fame. The answer came, "He is a pupil of Diderot."
Although this answer did not contain the whole truth, it was yet significant of a change that was taking place in the aspirations of many French people. Diderot, a clever and copious man of letters, had commenced to write about pictures, and he was now advocating that art should be devoted to the cause of morality. Greuze's picture happening to coincide with his own idea, he at once wrote an enthusiastic, one may almost say a gushing, eulogy of this and other similar works of the artist; and in that way he helped to swell the renown which Greuze had now achieved.
Meanwhile, the artist, with that perversity which one has noted in the early life of other famous men, must now leave his own path to go to study art in Italy. Hundreds of years have been needed to convince painters that the Italian artists wrought great pictures because they expressed their own ideas of beauty, just as away from Italy Rembrandt "saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks." "I do not study the ancients," wrote Chantrey, heedless of syntax, "but I study where the ancients studied—nature."
The ambition of Greuze at this time was to belong to that singularly dreary and barren class of painters known as historical painters; and he wasted some years in the pursuit of a project which, in the end, brought him one of the most crushing humiliations of his whole life. "Woe to the artist," Goethe has written, "who leaves his hut to squander himself in academic halls of state!" and this woe fell upon Greuze in exceeding bitterness when his first historical picture was exhibited. But that incident belongs to the year 1769, and it was at the end of the year 1755, when he was thirty years of age, that he went to Italy.
Almost the only effect of his stay of two years in Italy was that for some time the figures in his pictures were arrayed in the "resplendent small clothes" of the people of that country, and had also Italian names. The painter who did really influence Greuze was Rubens, who was not an Italian, and whose pictures, no further away than the Luxembourg in Paris, it was in later years one of the great delights of his life to study.
In the list of Greuze's works for the year 1757 we notice amongst some pictures of the genre type—the representation, that is, of the life of the humble—a number of paintings which have Italian names; and then there are portraits, and the first of that long series of heads of girls and boys whose fame has outlasted the fame of all his more pretentious works.