Greuze’s Genre Painting and the Moral Drama of the Modern French Family
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
taken from my web site:
www.socialhistoryofart.com
(This essay was written in the early 1990s and was revised slightly in April 2011 with four new passages from Diderot and a paragraph on the happy father. For more on family themes in eighteenth-century French art, see my essays on “Family Values in 18th-Century France” and “Chardin”.)
Greuze’s Genre Painting and the Moral Drama of the Modern French Family
Greuze worked in the explicitly moralizing, sentimental narrative mode which Chardin carefully avoided, thereby playing to the new tastes for feeling shared by the French bourgeois and segments of the aristocracy. No enlightened art critic, social philosopher, and writer was more impressed with Greuze than Diderot. In his essays reviewing the bi-annual French art exhibition at the Salon in the 1760s, Diderot praised Greuze for revitalizing French art by painting serious dramas focused on the modern French family. Here was a moral alternative to French Rococo art whose playful, hedonistic, and artificial world had triumphed in the painting of Boucher. To understand Diderot’s view of Greuze, it helps to start with his critique of Boucher voiced in 1765.
“I don’t know what to say about this man. Degradation of taste, composition, character, expression, and drawing have kept pace with moral depravity. . . . he’s never encountered truth; I’d say the ideas of delicacy, forthrightness, innocence, and simplicity have become almost foreign to him . . . he’s never for a single instant seen nature, at least not the one made to interest my soul, yours, that of a well-born child, that of a sensitive woman. . . . He can show me all the clouds he likes. I’ll always see in them the rouge, the beauty spots, the powder puffs, and all the little vials of the make-up table. . . . When he does children he groups them well, but they’re best left to frolic on their clouds. . . . you won’t find a single one capable of the real activities of life, of studying his lesson, of reading, writing . . . There was a time when he couldn’t stop making Virgins. And what of these Virgins? Precious little flirts! And his angels? Wanton little satyrs. . . . This man takes up the brush only to show me breasts and buttocks. I’m happy enough to see them, but I don’t like it when they’re so brazenly touted. . . . Will I never be done with these cursed pastorals“ [1]
In most ways, Greuze was for Diderot a kind of anti-Boucher whose art offered hope for the redemption of French painting by directing it back from luxurious boudoirs, frilly pastorals, and mythological erotica.
“That Greuze really is my kind of man. . . . To begin with, I like the genre. It’s moral painting. What? Hasn’t the painter’s brush been given over to sin and vice often enough and for far too long? Should we be pleased to see it at last competing with dramatic verse to move us, teach us, improve us, and invite us to be virtuous? Keep it up. Greuze, my friend! Put moral lessons in your paintings . . .” [2]
For Diderot, Rousseau, Lessing, and other bourgeois writers of the second half of the eighteenth century, no subject was more central to the new culture of morality, virtue, and sentiment than the modern family. This explains how the contemporary family which first appeared widely only in seventeenth-century Dutch art expanded across Europe as an important new subject after 1730. [3] It began with Chardin in the 1730s, continued with Greuze in the 1750s and 60s, and continued with Fragonard, Gerard, and others in the last third of the century. It also spread into Italy, Spain, and England, as seen in the work of Hogarth who challenged the supremacy of history painting with numerous moralizing cycles of everyday British life. Among these were his Rake’s Progress, Harlot’s Progress, Marriage à la Mode, and The Industrious vs. the Idle Apprentice. [4]
One key example of Greuze’s new family drama is his Well-Loved Mother, a painting which impressed Diderot deeply. It depicts a French rustic interior with a peasant mother, six clinging children, and the husband who returning from a day of hunting to rhapsodize at the sight of his large family and happy wife. Although traditional scholarship has stressed the happy mother, the most original invention of Greuze is the happy father. In many ways, this subject said more about the new age of sentiment which triumphed across Europe after 1750 than the more conventional theme of the happy mother which was already ubiquitous in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting and in countless sentimental Madonnas and allegories of Caritas since Botticelli, Bellini, and Raphael. Although Dutch Baroque art had tentatively explored the loving father in religious art (Maes’s Christ and the Little Children, Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, and Lieven’s Abraham and Isaac), the father was largely excluded from Dutch seventeenth century genre painting with the exception of Steen’s raucous parties. Now did earlier Dutch fathers ever look at their families and overflow with feeling. In earlier Dutch genre, the father existed primarily outside the painting as more of a controlling gaze. Even Chardin ignored the father, following the lead of his Dutch models and working two decades before the new sentiment triumphed in French culture. Boys were welcome as subjects in Chardin but fathers and husbands were of excluded until Greuze redefined family values and genre painting in the 1760s. For the next three decades, the sentimental father remained a common subject in French art and literature. With the coming of the French Revolution, the happy family reverted to a strictly feminine space as seen in the genre paintings of Marguerite Gerard.
Greuze invented the happy father in part by modeling him on the happy mother. In Greuze and Fragonard, the sentimental father was often an excited witness participating in a “feminine” realm of maternal affection, compassion, and patience. The new father learned by watching and imitating his happy wife.
As a male spectator already heavily invested in the new homme sensible (man of feeling), [5] Diderot brought a new kind of empathetic writing to bear on Greuze’s Well-Loved Mother. Most of his comments worked to experience the maternal tenderness depicted by Greuze and to allow his readers to share in those emotional rewards. In that sense, Diderot’s experience of looking at the painting reenacted the emotionally-charged looking of the husband while exploring the emotional experiences of the other actors including the mother, the grand-mother, and even the children. Through writing aimed at inhabiting various states of feeling, Diderot (and his readers) transformed themselves into good mothers and the good fathers of a sort. Here is the Diderot’s summary of Greuze’s Well-Loved Mother.
“His satisfaction betrays his vanity at having sired this pretty swarm . . . This is excellent both for the talent it demonstrates and for its moral content; it preaches population, and paints a sympathetic picture of the happiness and advantages deriving from domesticity; it announces to any man with soul and feelings: Maintain your family comfortably, make children with your wife, as many as you can, but only with her, and you can be sure of a happy home.” [6]
The Family Theme Aspires to the Grand Rhetoric of History Painting
Some of Diderot’s highest praise was reserved for Greuze’s dramatic pair of paintings, The Father's Curse and The Son Punished (1778) where the artist endowed genre painting with the lofty visual rhetoric of history painting. In his two-part family drama, Greuze collapsed the life of the bad son into two moments, the departure of the son for a life of adventure in the army, despite his father’s curse, and the unhappy moment of the ruined son’s return at his father’s deathbed, too late to seek forgiveness. Commenting on two sketches of the final paintings, Diderot wrote,
“these two works are, in my view, masterpieces of composition; none of the postures is awkward or forced; the actions are true and appropriate for painting; and this last one [the Return] especially has an intensity that’s unified and pervasive. Nonetheless, current tastes are so wretched, so trivialized that these two sketches might never be painted, and if they’re painted, Boucher will have sold fifty of his flat, indecent marionettes before Greuze manages to sell his two sublime paintings.” [7]
For all its parallels with the traditional Biblical theme of the prodigal son, Greuze’s painting takes us into a secular world of family life and worldly justice far from traditional religious history paintings like Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son. In the Biblical story and in Rembrandt’s painting, the sinner was forgiven and rewarded by a paternal figure radiating a sacred love and forgiveness beyond worldly comprehension. Biblical parable and painting expressed the mystery of God’s love. In eighteenth-century genre painting and prints, sin gives way to its secular counterpart, vice, in moralizing sagas of virtue rewarded and vice punished. Greuze's transformation of the prodigal son narrative affirmed a new, secular, worldly order where all bad sons received their just deserts. Here one should mention Hogarth’s extended print cycle contrasting a good and a bad apprentice. Like Greuze’s foolish son, the bad apprentice runs off with disreputable soldiers and ends up ruined.
By drawing on the heroic, planar compositions and grand rhetoric of a Poussin, Greuze endowed bourgeois and rustic scenes with the universality of the everyday explored by Chardin yet made it more theatrical, more rhetorically dramatic and powerful. One contemporary critic noted that Greuze's "brush knows how to ennoble the rustic genre without altering its truth". In such genre paintings, Diderot saw hopes for a new, modern art, a replacement for a badly eroded history painting which might yet reclaim seriousness, grandeur, universality, and moral wisdom. We could almost call this "family history painting", or rather, the bourgeois substitute for a history painting turned decorative, formulaic, erotic, and increasingly trite.
After meeting with some success with his family dramas, Greuze aspired to a new career in history painting, a subject broached in his Septimus Severus Reproaching His Son Caracalla for Plotting to Murder Him (1769). Here Greuze’s family themes found a new subject plucked from classical history. Unfortunately, the jury rejection of Greuze’s Septimus Severus alienated Greuze from the Salon and he withdrew from the world of official art exhibitions in his later career, undermining his efforts as an artist. One also wonders whether there was ever enough of a market in France for Greuze’s family dramas. In speaking more generally about the state of art in France, Diderot was often pessimistic about the prospects for serious painting.
“In the present century and under the present reign the impoverished nation has not framed a single grand enterprise, no great works, nothing that might nourish the spirit and exalt the soul. At present, great artists don’t develop at all or are compelled to endure humiliations to avoid dying of hunger.” [8]
Two Liabilities for Modern Genre Painting as a New Category of Serious Art
In retrospect, we can also identity two serious flaws which marred much of Greuze’s genre painting which prevented this category from ever fulfilling its mission to replace what history painting had once offered. The first - moral insincerity - was unforgivable in an art which claimed such lofty ethics. While pretending to offer didactic scenes of lives gone astray, many genre paintings such as Greuze's Slothful Maid arranged their fallen women to provide male viewers with titillating glimpses of exposed bosoms, a veritable leitmotif in Greuze. In this way, the art-collecting male beholder could simultaneously blame the maid for her laziness while reducing her to an exciting object for his own sexual fantasies. Indeed, her ostensibly dissolution (drunkenness) is the very feature which makes her vulnerable to the opportunistic dreams of the painter and male beholder (not unlike the "sleep" of the half-naked shepherdesses in Rococo pastoral). Even more perverse is the way her sorry condition allowed the male beholder to blame her for the very sexual license said to result from such "dissolution" and suggested in her loosened clothing and removed shoe.
In other works such as Sleep, Greuze capitalized on the erotic potential of the "good mother" theme by painting the youngest, most beautiful peasant mothers he could imagine and by using the virtuous breast-feeding theme as an excuse to display the prettiest breasts he could paint (1757). Despite the burgher imagery, we are not that distant from Boucher's pastoral where simple, beautiful, young shepherdesses "fell asleep" and "accidentally" displayed their breasts to appreciative shepherds. The same holds true for Greuze’s girls ostensibly personifying innocence and virtue while flaunting virginal flesh for the delectation of the male viewer. Diderot himself rhapsodized over one of these chaste yet bare-breasted maidens painted by Greuze in a manner which reminds us that he was a well-known libertine in his youth who wrote long encyclopedia essays justifying male licentiousness as compatible with reason, virtue, and civilization. And even later in life when he turned away from explicitly libertine writings and behavior, he still enjoyed the endless parade of bare breasts and bottoms in Boucher as noted in his review quoted above.
It took a later, Symbolist writer (1880s) specializing in decadence themes, to expose Greuze as a tasteful, soft-core pornographer sharing much with his supposed antithesis in the art world, Boucher. In the following passage, Greuze, not Boucher, becomes the most appealing example of Rococo sensuality. Wrapped in virtue, sensuality acquires for this writer a delicious hypocrisy.