Jean baptiste greuze biography pdf

Greuze was born at Tournus , a market town in Burgundy. He is generally said to have formed his own talent; at an early age his inclinations, though thwarted by his father, were encouraged by a Lyonnese artist named Grandon, or Grondom, who enjoyed during his lifetime considerable reputation as a portrait-painter. Grandon not only persuaded Greuze's father to give way to his son's wishes, and permit the boy to accompany him as his pupil to Lyon , but, when at a later date he left Lyon for Paris, Grandon carried young Greuze with him.

By other and more remarkable works of the same class Greuze soon established his claims beyond contest, and won the notice and support of the well-known connoisseur La Live de Jully, the brother-in-law of Madame d'Epinay. Gougenot had some acquaintance with the arts, and was highly valued by the Academicians, who, during his journey with Greuze, elected him an honorary member of their body on account of his studies in mythology and allegory ; his acquirements in these respects are said to have been largely utilized by them, but to Greuze they were of doubtful advantage, and he lost rather than gained by this visit to Italy in Gougenot's company.

He had undertaken it probably in order to silence those who taxed him with ignorance of great models of style, but the Italian subjects which formed the entirety of his contributions to the Salon of showed that he had been put on a false track, and he speedily returned to the source of his first inspiration. In the Salon of , Salon of and Salon of Greuze exhibited with ever-increasing success; at the Salon of he reached the zenith of his powers and reputation.

Universally known as Jean-Baptiste, Greuze was actually baptised simply Jean according to the parish register (Tournus, Saint-André), although by the time of his marriage, in , he .

The Academy took occasion to press Greuze for his diploma picture, the execution of which had been long delayed, and forbade him to exhibit on their walls until he had complied with their regulations. Greuze wished to be received as a historical painter and produced a work which he intended to vindicate his right to despise his qualifications as a genre artist.

The Academicians received their new member with all due honours, but at the close of the ceremonies the Director addressed Greuze in these words: "Sir, the Academy has accepted you, but only as a genre painter; the Academy has respect for your former productions, which are excellent, but she has shut her eyes to this one, which is unworthy, both of her and of you yourself.

In the following year, on 4 March , he died in the Louvre in great poverty.

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He had been in receipt of considerable wealth, which he had dissipated by extravagance and bad management as well as embezzlement by his wife so that during his closing years he was forced to solicit commissions which his enfeebled powers no longer enabled him to carry out with success. Around the stem was a paper inscribed: "These flowers offered by the most grateful of his students are emblems of his glory.

It was Mlle Mayer , later the friend of Prudhon. The brilliant reputation which Greuze acquired seems to have been due, not to his accomplishments as a painter — for his practice is evidently that current in his own day — but to the character of the subjects which he treated. That return to nature which inspired Rousseau 's attacks upon an artificial civilization demanded expression in art.

The touch of melodramatic exaggeration, however, which runs through them finds an apology in the firm and brilliant play of line, in the freshness and vigour of the flesh tints, in the enticing softness of expression, by the alluring air of health and youth, by the sensuous attractions, in short, with which Greuze invests his lessons of bourgeois morality.