1725 -1805 · Tournus, Lyon, Paris and Italy

Visible tears, family dramas and sensitive portraits make Greuze the great director of moral sentiment in the Age of Enlightenment.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was born in Tournus in 1725 and first trained in Lyon before moving to Paris. He made himself known at the Salon of 1755 with genre scenes where gestures, looks and expressions tell an immediately understandable story. A trip to Italy enriched his repertoire, but his real estate remained the contemporary family. The Village Accordée, presented in 1761, brings this ambition to its peak. Around the marriage contract, father, daughter, future husband, mother, sisters and notary form a theater of contradictory feelings. Around the marriage contract, father, daughter, future husband, mother, sisters and notary form a theater of contradictory feelings. Around the marriage contract, the village accordée, presented in 1761, brings this ambition to its peak. Around the marriage contract, father, daughter, future husband, mother, sisters and notary form a theater of contradictory feelings. Around the marriage contract, father, daughter, future husband, mother, sisters and notary form a theater of contradictory feelings. Around the marriage contract, father, daughter, future husband, mother, sisters and notary form a theater of contradictory feelings. Around the marriage contract, father, daughter, future husband, mother, sisters need a text. Diderot admires this moral power of painting, capable, according to him, of moving and instructing. Greuze then develops great domestic stories about filial piety, paternal authority, ingratitude and reconciliation. Filial Piety shows the family gathered around an old man: care of the body, proximity to generations and attentive gestures build a virtue made visible. Alongside these groups, isolated young girls become one of his most sought-after motifs. The broken jug combines flowers, undone clothing, broken containers and ambiguous gaze. The image can be read as an allegory of fragility, loss or the passage to age adult, without being reduced to a single interpretation. In Young Girl Who Mourns Her Dead Bird, the small absent or inanimate animal concentrates sorrow and allows the painter to display tears, skin, hair and fabrics. Greuze is also a remarkable portrait painter, precise without being cold. His desire to be recognized as a history painter, however, caused a crisis with the Academy: received only in 1769 as a genre painter, he moved away from the official Salon for a long time. The Revolution then upset his clientele and his last years were difficult. Died at the Louvre in 1805, Greuze left a work which still questions the relationship between sincere emotion, social theater and moral painting. The "Jean-Baptiste Greuze" selection notably compares L’Accordée de village and La Piété filial. Its reading favors light.

Greuze organizes the painting as a scene where every hand and every tear speaks; feeling becomes the real subject of the story.