Jean-Baptiste Greuze: 7 works

'Jean-Baptiste Greuze achieved fame for his morally uplifting narrative paintings, but he was equally adept working in the pastoral, erotic mode brought to refinement by François Boucher.'

'Indeed, Jean-Baptiste Greuze stripped the traditional theme of the washerwoman of its association with the virtue of hard work and instead overlaid it with a titillating sensuality typical of Rococo art.'

'Like much of Greuze's early work, The Wool Winder owes something to Chardin's genre pictures of the 1730s, which in turn recall the Dutch seventeenth-century genre scenes the French were collecting avidly in the early eighteenth century. But Greuze's pictures are usually, as here, more whimsical and anecdotal, as well as more refined in execution.'

'This oval painting is typical of a type perfected by Greuze which played on the viewer's emotions.'

'Closely basing the setting and arrangement of figures on Peter Paul Rubens's version, Greuze probably made this oil sketch as the final stage of preparation for an unexecuted, large-scale painting. Contemporaries admired the rapid execution, vibrant colors, and lively paint handling in Greuze's oil sketches.'

'Prior to making this drawing, he made numerous studies of individual figures, such as the Study of the Head of an Old Woman,who is one of the principal characters in this scene. These carefully rendered drawings provide evidence of Greuze's working methods and testify to his careful preparation.'

'Although Jean-Baptiste Greuze often made preparatory drawings of individual figures for major narrative works like this one, he seems to have made this large and highly finished drawing after his own painting of this subject in the Musée du Louvre.'