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Premium Jean Baptiste GREUZE (Paris 1725 - Tournus 1805)
Lascivious …
See original version (French)
Jean Baptiste GREUZE (Paris 1725 - Tournus 1805)
Lascivious …
See original version (French)
Lot no. 50
Description
Jean Baptiste GREUZE (Paris 1725 - Tournus 1805)
Lascivious young girl
Walnut panel, coated with filasse
Height : 46,8 cm
Width: 38 cm
Provenance :
Unpublished
The lot can be viewed by the expert at Cabinet Turquin until Wednesday 26 November: 69 Rue Sainte-Anne, 75002 Paris, +33 (0)1 47 03 48 78.
"I defy you to see the figures of this painter without emotion: he has found the art of giving painting the warmth of life.
the warmth of life. (Diderot, Salon of 1767).
In a gesture of extreme abandon, a young woman with her body halfway down, her bust slightly uncovered, tips her head back and puts her hand on her head.
and places her hand on her forehead. Her face, with its graceful and delicate features, is animated by an expression
pain and ecstasy, in an expressive style typical of Greuze. Her blonde hair, wavy and
partially held back by a red ribbon, spread freely over her shoulders. The luminous complexion
contrasts with the white drapery and crimson cloak, emphasising the sensuality of the figure. The uncovered breast
accentuates this state: it suggests that passion is so strong that it has "shattered" social conventions. This is
a strategy for making the pathos more vivid, while capturing the viewer's attention, between morality and
seduction. Greuze constantly played on this ambivalence: his contemporaries saw in these figures
sometimes the image of threatened virtue, sometimes that of feminine desire. Diderot himself marvelled at this, noting
Greuze knew how to "speak to the soul and the senses at the same time".
Greuze developed a singular art form, somewhere between portraiture, genre scenes and moral expression. This female effigy
female effigy is one of his favourite expressive figures, in which gestures and expressions
become vectors of intense feeling.
The composition is designed to capture the viewer through the contrast between the classical idealisation of the face
and the naturalism of the fabrics and hair. The blended, almost glazed brushstrokes are in keeping with his
style of the 1770s.
We can compare our painting with Tête de jeune fille (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 1979-38), where
Greuze already expresses this mixture of gentleness and inner turmoil, but also of the Jeune fille éplorée (Paris,
musée du Louvre, inv. RF 2947), very similar in the pose of the upside-down head and the dramatic expression; or
La Volupté, (private collection, Antoine Chatelain, Greuze l'enfance, la famille, Paris Galerie
Coatalem, 2024,cat. N° 54); it is also one of the many heads of character painted or drawn by
Greuze, which eighteenth-century collectors loved and bought at a premium.
Contemporary critical reception allows us to place our painting in the context of a veritable
revolution in taste. Greuze is precisely one of the painters that Diderot commented on most at length in his
his Salons:
"Greuze is a man of great talent; he paints truth, he paints the soul, he paints the heart"? His heads are
charming; they speak, they think"? "He is the painter of manners, of domestic virtues, of naive and touching
naïve and touching passions". (Diderot, Salon of 1765).
These lines from Diderot fit perfectly with the figure in our painting: a young woman with idealised features
but whose expression is vibrant, between abandon and pain. The philosopher rightly emphasises Greuze's
Greuze's ability to go beyond simple portraiture to achieve moral and emotional intensity.
Diderot even goes so far as to compare Greuze to a playwright in painting: his isolated figures, like ours, should be read as "heads of a play",
should be read as "heads of expression", like an actor frozen in a pathetic moment.
Freidrich Melchior Grimm (Correspondance littéraire, 1760s?1770s) admired Greuze's originality but
sometimes more measured in his judgement than Diderot:
"Greuze was the first to give genre painting nobility and interest. His figures are
touching without being trivial"? "His heads of young girls, touching and full of truth, are passionately
sought with passion by the curious.
For Diderot, Greuze was the painter of true passions, of theatrical pathos; for Grimm, he was the one who elevated genre painting to the rank of theatrical painting.
For Grimm, he was the one who elevated genre painting to the rank of moral and sensitive painting, thus seducing art lovers.
Expert Cabinet Turquin.
In order to bid on this lot, a bank card imprint of 5,000 euros is required as a deposit. Please contact the auction house on 03 87 36 68 53 or by email: [email protected]
See original version (French)
Auto-translation. Refer to original language for legal validity.
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