Biographies

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725 – 1805) He was born in Tournus, France, and a musem there still honors him. He had a great success at the 1755 Salon with his Father Reading the Bible to his Children and went on to win enormous popularity with similar sentimental and melodramatic genre scenes. His work was praised by Diderot as “‘morality in paint” and as representing the highest ideal of painting in his day. He became known for his paintings of girls with a symbol of lost innocence (“Greuze girls”), which made him abhorrent to the anti-sentimental modernists.