Greuze, Jean-Baptiste

(born Aug. 21, 1725, Tournus, Fr.—died March 21, 1805, Paris) French painter. He studied at the Royal Academy in Paris. His first exhibited painting, The Father Reading the Bible to His Children, won him immediate success at the Salon of 1755. Throughout the 1760s he won acclaim with such sentimental works as The Village Betrothal (1761) and Prodigal Son (c. 1765). Hoping to gain admission to the academy as a history painter, he submitted a large historical work; when it was rejected, he refused to exhibit anywhere but his own studio for 30 years. He earned a living with morality pictures and images of young women in innocent disarray, but in time his popularity waned. The reaction against his sentimental genre paintings resulted in critical neglect of his drawings and portraits, which display great technical gifts.

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