Greuze, like Watteau, marked out a special line of his own; and with him French bourgeois Art reappears once more. His domestic scenes were described by Diderot as follows: “Cet artist est le premier entre nous qui se soit avisé de donner des murs dans l’art.” This remark applies to his Malédiction Paternelle, l’Accordée du Village, etc.
Plate LXXV.
Photo. Giraudon.
Young Girl.
By Greuze.
Musée Condé.
His charming Portrait of a Young Girl in a little cap at Chantilly represents Georgette, daughter of his concierge in Paris; and she can be recognised again in the same artist’s l’Accordée du Village in the Louvre, and perhaps also in the painting of a Young Girl winding Wool, lately added to Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s Collection. The pendant to Georgette in the Musée Condé is a portrait of a Young Boy, her brother. These two paintings, together with Le Tendre Desir, belong to the artist’s best period, whilst La Surprise is a work of his old age. This last work exhibits to us the curious fact that a problem which had steadily pursued him throughout his long life—namely, how to paint the first awakenings of love in a maiden’s mind—still puzzled him at the age of nearly eighty. It is certainly an irony of fate that after a romantic attachment to a young Italian Countess—whose portrait he painted, but whom he was prevented from marrying—he should have returned to Paris, to become the husband of a woman much older than himself, who presently made his life almost unendurable. It was perhaps the memory of this youthful idyll which induced him to paint so often those young maidens whose faces smile at us from the walls of so many Galleries throughout Europe. The Young Woman in a Hat in the Wallace Collection is perhaps the most fascinating of them all, since nothing can surpass the grace and piquancy of expression in her lovely countenance.