Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Works by this Artist

Drunken Cobbler
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1782

Background

Son of a roofer

Studies

With portrait painter Charles Grandon in Lyon (1748-50); Académie Royale (1750-55)

Career

1755 – Becomes Académie Royal junior member (agréé); first Salon exhibition (Family Bible Reading, private collection)

1769 – Becomes Académie Royal full member (genre painter) based on acceptance of Septimius Severus Reproaching Caracalla, whose merits as a history painting were considered below Académie standards

Helped by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, admired by Denis Diderot

Travels

Rome (1755-57)

Commissions from

Marquis de Marigny, Ange-Laurent de La Live de Jully

Important Artworks

Broken Eggs, 1757 Salon (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

The Marriage Contract, 1761 Salon (Louvre, Paris)

Filial Piety, 1763 Salon (Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg)

Septimius Severus Reproaching Caracalla, 1769 (Musée Greuze, Tournus)

Self-Portrait, n.d. (Musée Greuze, Tournus)

Readings

Barker, Emma. Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Munhall, Edgar. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1725-1805. Exhibition catalogue, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 1976

Images