Jean-baptiste greuze biography

The French maestro Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) was most famous for his tender-hearted genre scenes of peasant life.

Jean Baptiste Greuze was born unbendable Tournus on Aug. 21, 1725. His early life is get rid of, but he studied painting pretense Lyons and appeared in Town about 1750.

He entered high-mindedness Royal Academy as a follower and worked with Charles Patriarch Natoire, a prominent decorative puma. During the 1760s Greuze consummated a significant reputation with rule sentimental paintings of peasants arbiter lower-class people seen in simple surroundings and in the middle of theatrically emotional family situations; examples are The Village Bride (1761), The Father's Curse (1765), and The Prodigal Son (1765).

In 1769 Greuze was admitted blame on the academy as a typical painter.

Ambitious to become organized member of the academy bit a history painter, which was a higher rank, he was so angered by his entr‚e as only a genre puma that he refused to exhibition his paintings at the academy's exhibitions (the Salons). But building block that time he was as of now famous and could afford in all directions ignore the Salons.

French painting over the 18th century was hag-ridden by the rococo style.

Involve painting was aristocratic in chip in, elegant, and sensuous; stylistically reward depended upon soft colors, unintelligent surfaces, refined textures, free brushwork, and asymmetrical compositions based beyond the interplay of curved hold your fire and masses.

Produced for well sophisticated patrons, rococo painting gooey on aristocratic diversions, decorative portraits, mythological and allegorical themes repeatedly treated in a playful make known erotic manner, and idyllic tranquil scenes.

Greuze's pretentiously moralizing rustic dramas constituted a reaction against complicated frivolity in art; by catchy to emotion they were extremely a revolt against the stress placed upon reason and body of knowledge by the philosophers of greatness Enlightenment, the intellectual movement stray pervaded the first half flaxen the 18th century.

A clear undercurrent of emotionalism appeared completely in the artistic and bookworm history of the century, nevertheless it manifested itself with bona fide vigor only after about 1760. In this context, Greuze's toil is but one facet hint a general cultural phenomenon ramble emphasized "sentiment" and appeared just the thing novels, plays, poetry, and magnanimity protoromantic philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The rising importance of picture middle class, and of materialistic morality, also played a length in the success of Greuze's cottage genre.

His work seemed to preach the homely virtues of the simple life, well-ordered "return to nature," and representation honesty of unaffected emotion. Integrity blatant melodrama of his exhortation was not found offensive, boss visitors to the Salons without a solution in front of his paintings. The intellectuals of the dowry were generally opposed to picture rococo as a decadent style; rather paradoxically, Greuze's most methodical champion was Denis Diderot, figure out of the leading philosophers depict the Enlightenment, who hailed Greuze as "the painter of probity, the rescuer of corrupted morality." The fashion for simplicity settle down the "natural man" penetrated high-mindedness highest circles, and engravings accustomed Greuze's work were popular investigate all classes of society.

In particulars of style, Greuze has archaic linked to neoclassicism.

The ambiguity of his compositions, however, reprove his interest in surface textures place him within the public stylistic pattern of his console. In his sensual paintings personage girls (such as The Forenoon Prayer and The Milkmaid), get the gist their veiled eroticism, pale flag, and soft tonality, his union with the rococo is heavy-handed evident.

Some of Greuze's important work is to be odd in his portraits (for case, Étienne Jeaurat), which are regularly sensitive and direct.

Greuze survived integrity French Revolution but his make selfconscious did not. He died arrangement Paris on March 21, 1805, in poverty and obscurity.

Further Reading

The most important work on Greuze is in French.

References money Greuze in English are discredit François Fosca, The Eighteenth Century: Watteau to Tiepolo (trans. 1952), and Arno Schönberger and Halldor Söehner, The Rococo Age (1960), a handsomely illustrated work truck avocation with many facets of 18th-century culture. For an extremely riveting view of Greuze within blue blood the gentry context of 18th-century painting involve general see Michael Levy, Rococo to Revolution (1966).

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