Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was born in 1725 in Tournus, in Burgundy, trained in Lyon and then moved to Paris. In 1755 he exhibited genre scenes of rural family life at the Salon to immediate acclaim, and he then traveled to Italy. Greuze became famous for moralizing genre paintings such as The Village Bride and The Paralytic, in which ordinary families act out dramas of filial devotion, affection and repentance with exaggerated, affecting expressions full of theater and sentiment. These works suited the Enlightenment's taste for virtue and feeling, and the critic Denis Diderot praised them highly. He also painted many heads of young girls, artless yet faintly suggestive. Broken Eggs, painted in Italy and shown at the Salon of 1757, depicts a girl sitting beside broken eggs while her mother reproaches a young man; the broken eggs allude to lost innocence. In 1769 Greuze applied to the Academy as a history painter but was received only as a painter of genre, and in anger he stopped exhibiting at the Salon. After the Revolution he lost his patrons, and he died in poverty in Paris in 1805.