GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Judging from this model's resemblance to the heroine of Greuze's large-scale genre scene The Well-Beloved Mother (private collection, Lisbon), this tête d'expression ("expressive head") probably depicts Madame de la Borde, the voluptuous wife of the wealthy banker by whom The Well-Beloved Mother was commissioned. In such highly finished studies of the face, the artist's aim was to conjure an immediately legible emotional state. In this case, the sitter's flushed complexion, slightly parted lips, and heavy-lidded eyes create the impression that she has been caught in the middle of some erotic daydream.
Greuze was the most celebrated genre painter of the 18th century. His empathetic depictions of everyday life were as
fashionable as the 18th-century romance novels to which they were often compared. In such "expressive heads," which were much coveted by collectors, Greuze's ability to conjure emotion through facial expression alone is showcased.
Excerpt from
Dorothy Kosinski, DMA label text, 1996.
NOTES
former number according to education doc- T43007.31
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
Checked Piction
Name format Jean-Baptiste Greuze
See Greuze in PC- 1961.105 Greuze, Portrait of Jean-Nicholas Billaud-Varenne
There can be no image more emblematic of the singular talents of Greuze than this small, very beautiful tete d 'expression (in English, 'expressive head'). In the 18th century aesthetic interest in emotional expression in painting was strong enough for the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture to invent a new category for competition among its students: the tete d'expression. Contestant would be given an emotion, such as suffering, compassion, wrath, etc., which they would then have to pictorialize through the depiction of a single figure at bust-length. While the belief that expression could be conveyed through a conventional manipulation of each feature ofthe face was developed in the 17th century, it was Greuze who best exemplified the new 18th-century commitment to direct observation from life. Greuze, who was an instant popular success when he first exhibited at the Salon in 1755, redefined the subject matter specialization known as genre painting (the representation of everyday life).
Instead of depicting an idealized or comical vision of the peasantry, as was commonly the case in 1i h-century Dutch genre painting, Greuze lent his characters a contemporary vividness that was often both sentimental and dramatic. Judging from her resemblance to the heroine of Greuze's large-scale genre scene, The Well- Beloved Mother (1765-69, Private Collection, Lisbon), this fete d'expression probably dates from a transitional decade in Greuze's career. In 1769, Greuze would create a veritable scandal with his choice to submit for his formal acceptance into the Academy an ambitious history painting. Greuze's Septimius Severus and Caracalla (now in the Louvre) met with nothing but scorn from his academic higher-ups. Thoroughly humiliated by his reception into the academy as a specialist of genre painting, rather than the more prestigious category of history painting, Greuze would shun the Salon for the next thirty years. Fortunately, Greuze's widespread popularity made it possible for him to
subsist comfortably without academic sponsorship, through the patronage of private collectors in France and abroad. If it were not for the financial disaster wrecked upon him by the advent ofthe Revolution and by the vindictiveness of his ex-wife, Greuze would have died a wealthy man.
The Rosenberg Dreamer is one of several, small expressive heads by Greuze that appear to portray the same voluptuous young woman (possibly Madame de la Borde, the wife of the wealthy banker by whom the Well-Beloved Mother was commissioned). The sitter's flushed complexion, slightly parted lips, and heavy-lidded eyes create a sexually charged atmosphere, as though she has been caught in the middle of some erotic daydream.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 32-33.
This young woman’s heavily lidded eyes, parted lips, and completely relaxed pose suggest she is lost in a state of dreamy reverie. This is one of many vivid, expressive images of faces Jean-Baptiste Greuze painted during his career. Although typically small in size and loosely painted, they were not intended as studies for larger paintings; rather, they were independent works created to display the artit’s skill in expressing various emotional states.
Heather MacDonald
The Lillian and James H. Clark Assocaite Curator of European Art
2012
Her heavily lidded eyes, parted lips, and completely relaxed pose suggest this young woman is lost in a state of dreamy reverie. This is one ofmany vivid, expressive, images of faces Jean-Baptiste Greuze painted during his career. Although typically small in size and loosely painted, they were not intended as studies for larger paintings. Rather, they were independent works created to display the artist's skill in expressing various emotional states.
From- didactic and label copy in education files, no date or author.
The Dreamer (facing page and fig. 94, p. 132) is one of five extant canvases, each a variation on a theme, produced by Jean-Baptiste Greuze as early as 1765 and likely throughout the next forty years of his career.2 These literally bust-length female figures, depicted at various angles with corresponding tilts of the head, are proffered to the spectator for his or her delectation. The “original” model, according to Diderot and persistently so identified in more recent secondary literature,3 was Greuze’s then-comely wife, Anne-Gabrielle Babuti; the daughter of a bookseller, she came to fully occupy the artist’s imagination as his favorite muse for the first seven years of their marriage.4
Greuze’s lifelong recycling of Madame Greuze’s features—especially in the endless line-up of so-called Greuze Girls,6 in which her teardrop-shaped eyes that droop at the corners, arched brows, diminutive nose, and dimpled chin have hardened into near caricature—anticipates the big-eyed girls ubiquitous in twenty-first-century graphic novels and anime movies. As frequently remarked, the Greuze Girl found a ready clientele not only among collectors of the second half of the eighteenth century but, especially, during the Victorian age. If, in fact, Madame Greuze (or should I say Anne-Gabrielle Babuti, given her ever-adolescent appearance) really is the Greuze Girl, then it could be posited that the artist may have acted somewhat vindictively, turning his former spouse into an eternal object of a shared masculine fantasy of sexual possession for as long as there are viewers enticed by her evident availability—in other words, prostituting her in the service of his art.
I am more interested in relocating at least the Rosenberg version of the Greuze Girl within a broader pictorial context that characterizes and unites what are otherwise seemingly unrelated artists.
Although Greuze’s frequent use of Madame Greuze as a model was commented upon by critics (and most copiously by Denis Diderot),9 especially during the 1760s when Greuze’s reputation was on the ascent, the artist’s constant repetition of this compositional formula well into his late career has ultimately unmoored the subject’s referential meaning from any specific individual. In this respect, Greuze’s repetition of Madame Greuze in this specific guise rapidly erodes any portrait-like specificity, not unlike the repetition practiced by later nineteenth-century artists such as Pierre Bonnard, with his countless depictions of an ever-youthful Marthe de Méligny at the bath, or Paul Cézanne, with his more cold-blooded pictorial analyses of Madame Cézanne. Indeed, the habit of giving these close-up depictions of a young woman in near undress such softened allegorical titles as “the dreamer” or “voluptuousness”10 points to their ready reception as something quite other than portraits of Greuze’s wife.
In the case of Greuze, the artist’s visible strokes of paint balance between our attention to their literal materiality, applied with perceptible hairs of the brush, and our willingness to accept the overwhelming illusion of the painting having been done d’après nature, from life. With a Rubensian mastery of translucent glazes, Greuze effortlessly conjures the difference between flesh and fabric, or downy cheek and silken curls.
If we return to Greuze’s Dreamer (fig. 94) and consider it with respect to the mechanics of signification peculiar to the tronie, its efficacy can now be fully appreciated. Despite all of the particularization that seems to proclaim the painting as a close study done from life—such as the exquisitely observed softness of skin, the humidity of parted lips, and the textural delicacy of the sheer fichu, or scarf, at her neck—this is likely not a depiction of a specific model (d’après nature), but rather a repetition of an idealized vision of feminine beauty, very distantly related to studies the artist first made of his wife. Recognition of its ambivalent referential status, as in the seventeenth-century Dutch tronie, makes the dating of its execution that much more difficult, as it was not necessarily created as a study for multifigural works like The Beloved Mother, as has often been assumed. The Dreamer is only one of a whole series that Greuze made of such beautiful creatures, presented to us as if inches away, variously aware or unaware of our presence, and all at life-size on a wide rectangular format of around eighteen by fifteen inches.
We hover between the compelling illusion of the psychological complexity of a “real” and, hence, unknowable mind just beyond the picture plane, and the admiration we must have for the artist’s skill: one more fictional repetition of a type that the artist has refined yet again, this time for a personification of one of the most valued attributes of the mind in the eighteenth century, Attention.25
Unfortunately, the titles of Greuze’s expressive heads, unless documented by reproductive prints that we know were produced under his direction, are difficult to track. They may be the inventions of nineteenth-century or, as we shall see, even modern-day auctioneers, who would have known the appeal of such literary devices for collectors interested in having a Greuze Girl of their very own.
In the Rosenberg version of The Dreamer, the young woman’s interior state of mind is made deliberately unreadable. In fact, her detachment, which perhaps prompted the otherwise unlikely title, is the main subject of the image. Even if the strategic deshabille was meant to satisfy the aims of voyeurism, the young woman’s eyes remain lost to us. We can easily project any number of emotions onto her relaxed facial muscles and distracted, unblinking gaze: Is she melancholic? Lost in a daydream, as the title given by the auction catalogue suggests? Or is her expression that of a bored studio model, hardened to the routine task of having her body displayed and manipulated for best pictorial effect? This kind of represented self-absorption is something Greuze would have learned, again, from Chardin, whose pensive scullery maids often radiate exactly the same kind of psychological inaccessibility.26
In the end, the question of how to categorize Greuze’s expressive heads of attractive young women—whether as fantasy figures, as studies of actual studio models, or as members of his family—is important only because these paintings continually beg the question in the first place. Greuze’s most successful “types,” knowingly propagated by the artist through strategic repetition in exhibited sketches, pastels, and reproductive prints, are the eighteenth-century equivalent of successful modern-day actors and actresses. We recognize them as “real” people, and easily disengage their features from any given role. At the same time, their association with the most memorable fictional characters they have played in the past often triggers our recognition of the emotional moods and thoughts of the current role they inhabit. Put another way, Greuze’s figural “types,” through repetition in a variety of narrative contexts, become floating signifiers, whose meaning is readily replenished because of the verisimilitude already cued by the particularities of their visual appearance.
WATTEAU and CONTEXT (copied into the "Fete Galante and the Academy" CC
Enlightenment attraction to subject matter that erodes superficial genre distinctions, a phenomenon often said to be announced by Antoine Watteau’s unprecedented 1717 reception into the Academy as a specialist of the fête galante. This was a category of painting Watteau invented to suit his allegories of love featuring courtly men and women set in an idyllic landscape, loosely resembling seventeenth-century Venetian and Flemish prototypes. Neither history painting, nor pure landscape, Watteau’s reception piece (see fig. 32, p. 45) has the air of allegory, although precisely of whom and for what remains a matter of debate. Such generic slippage increasingly comes to dominate French painting, particularly in the second half of the century.
Excerpt from
Eik Kahng, "Greuze's The Dreamer: Portrait, Tronie, or Fantasy Figure?" 125-140, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, (French, 1725–1805)
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
c. 1765-1769
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC~Compare this painting to Greuze's 1765 pastel The Well-Loved Mother.
- The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg~View a self portrait of the artist.
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
FUN FACTS
TEACHING IDEAS
RULES
Apply to objects where id equals 5325714
Category
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General Description
Judging from this model's resemblance to the heroine of Greuze's large-scale genre scene The Well-Beloved Mother (private collection, Lisbon), this tête d'expression ("expressive head") probably depicts Madame de la Borde, the voluptuous wife of the wealthy banker by whom The Well-Beloved Mother was commissioned. In such highly finished studies of the face, the artist's aim was to conjure an immediately legible emotional state. In this case, the sitter's flushed complexion, slightly parted lips, and heavy-lidded eyes create the impression that she has been caught in the middle of some erotic daydream.
Greuze was the most celebrated genre painter of the 18th century. His empathetic depictions of everyday life were as
fashionable as the 18th-century romance novels to which they were often compared. In such "expressive heads," which were much coveted by collectors, Greuze's ability to conjure emotion through facial expression alone is showcased.
Excerpt from
Dorothy Kosinski, DMA label text, 1996.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
- National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC~Compare this painting to Greuze's 1765 pastel The Well-Loved Mother.
- The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg~View a self portrait of the artist.
Notes
former number according to education doc- T43007.31
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
Checked Piction
Name format Jean-Baptiste Greuze
See Greuze in PC- 1961.105 Greuze, Portrait of Jean-Nicholas Billaud-Varenne
There can be no image more emblematic of the singular talents of Greuze than this small, very beautiful tete d 'expression (in English, 'expressive head'). In the 18th century aesthetic interest in emotional expression in painting was strong enough for the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture to invent a new category for competition among its students: the tete d'expression. Contestant would be given an emotion, such as suffering, compassion, wrath, etc., which they would then have to pictorialize through the depiction of a single figure at bust-length. While the belief that expression could be conveyed through a conventional manipulation of each feature ofthe face was developed in the 17th century, it was Greuze who best exemplified the new 18th-century commitment to direct observation from life. Greuze, who was an instant popular success when he first exhibited at the Salon in 1755, redefined the subject matter specialization known as genre painting (the representation of everyday life).
Instead of depicting an idealized or comical vision of the peasantry, as was commonly the case in 1i h-century Dutch genre painting, Greuze lent his characters a contemporary vividness that was often both sentimental and dramatic. Judging from her resemblance to the heroine of Greuze's large-scale genre scene, The Well- Beloved Mother (1765-69, Private Collection, Lisbon), this fete d'expression probably dates from a transitional decade in Greuze's career. In 1769, Greuze would create a veritable scandal with his choice to submit for his formal acceptance into the Academy an ambitious history painting. Greuze's Septimius Severus and Caracalla (now in the Louvre) met with nothing but scorn from his academic higher-ups. Thoroughly humiliated by his reception into the academy as a specialist of genre painting, rather than the more prestigious category of history painting, Greuze would shun the Salon for the next thirty years. Fortunately, Greuze's widespread popularity made it possible for him to
subsist comfortably without academic sponsorship, through the patronage of private collectors in France and abroad. If it were not for the financial disaster wrecked upon him by the advent ofthe Revolution and by the vindictiveness of his ex-wife, Greuze would have died a wealthy man.
The Rosenberg Dreamer is one of several, small expressive heads by Greuze that appear to portray the same voluptuous young woman (possibly Madame de la Borde, the wife of the wealthy banker by whom the Well-Beloved Mother was commissioned). The sitter's flushed complexion, slightly parted lips, and heavy-lidded eyes create a sexually charged atmosphere, as though she has been caught in the middle of some erotic daydream.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 32-33.
This young woman’s heavily lidded eyes, parted lips, and completely relaxed pose suggest she is lost in a state of dreamy reverie. This is one of many vivid, expressive images of faces Jean-Baptiste Greuze painted during his career. Although typically small in size and loosely painted, they were not intended as studies for larger paintings; rather, they were independent works created to display the artit’s skill in expressing various emotional states.
Heather MacDonald
The Lillian and James H. Clark Assocaite Curator of European Art
2012
Her heavily lidded eyes, parted lips, and completely relaxed pose suggest this young woman is lost in a state of dreamy reverie. This is one ofmany vivid, expressive, images of faces Jean-Baptiste Greuze painted during his career. Although typically small in size and loosely painted, they were not intended as studies for larger paintings. Rather, they were independent works created to display the artist's skill in expressing various emotional states.
From- didactic and label copy in education files, no date or author.
The Dreamer (facing page and fig. 94, p. 132) is one of five extant canvases, each a variation on a theme, produced by Jean-Baptiste Greuze as early as 1765 and likely throughout the next forty years of his career.2 These literally bust-length female figures, depicted at various angles with corresponding tilts of the head, are proffered to the spectator for his or her delectation. The “original” model, according to Diderot and persistently so identified in more recent secondary literature,3 was Greuze’s then-comely wife, Anne-Gabrielle Babuti; the daughter of a bookseller, she came to fully occupy the artist’s imagination as his favorite muse for the first seven years of their marriage.4
Greuze’s lifelong recycling of Madame Greuze’s features—especially in the endless line-up of so-called Greuze Girls,6 in which her teardrop-shaped eyes that droop at the corners, arched brows, diminutive nose, and dimpled chin have hardened into near caricature—anticipates the big-eyed girls ubiquitous in twenty-first-century graphic novels and anime movies. As frequently remarked, the Greuze Girl found a ready clientele not only among collectors of the second half of the eighteenth century but, especially, during the Victorian age. If, in fact, Madame Greuze (or should I say Anne-Gabrielle Babuti, given her ever-adolescent appearance) really is the Greuze Girl, then it could be posited that the artist may have acted somewhat vindictively, turning his former spouse into an eternal object of a shared masculine fantasy of sexual possession for as long as there are viewers enticed by her evident availability—in other words, prostituting her in the service of his art.
I am more interested in relocating at least the Rosenberg version of the Greuze Girl within a broader pictorial context that characterizes and unites what are otherwise seemingly unrelated artists.
Although Greuze’s frequent use of Madame Greuze as a model was commented upon by critics (and most copiously by Denis Diderot),9 especially during the 1760s when Greuze’s reputation was on the ascent, the artist’s constant repetition of this compositional formula well into his late career has ultimately unmoored the subject’s referential meaning from any specific individual. In this respect, Greuze’s repetition of Madame Greuze in this specific guise rapidly erodes any portrait-like specificity, not unlike the repetition practiced by later nineteenth-century artists such as Pierre Bonnard, with his countless depictions of an ever-youthful Marthe de Méligny at the bath, or Paul Cézanne, with his more cold-blooded pictorial analyses of Madame Cézanne. Indeed, the habit of giving these close-up depictions of a young woman in near undress such softened allegorical titles as “the dreamer” or “voluptuousness”10 points to their ready reception as something quite other than portraits of Greuze’s wife.
In the case of Greuze, the artist’s visible strokes of paint balance between our attention to their literal materiality, applied with perceptible hairs of the brush, and our willingness to accept the overwhelming illusion of the painting having been done d’après nature, from life. With a Rubensian mastery of translucent glazes, Greuze effortlessly conjures the difference between flesh and fabric, or downy cheek and silken curls.
If we return to Greuze’s Dreamer (fig. 94) and consider it with respect to the mechanics of signification peculiar to the tronie, its efficacy can now be fully appreciated. Despite all of the particularization that seems to proclaim the painting as a close study done from life—such as the exquisitely observed softness of skin, the humidity of parted lips, and the textural delicacy of the sheer fichu, or scarf, at her neck—this is likely not a depiction of a specific model (d’après nature), but rather a repetition of an idealized vision of feminine beauty, very distantly related to studies the artist first made of his wife. Recognition of its ambivalent referential status, as in the seventeenth-century Dutch tronie, makes the dating of its execution that much more difficult, as it was not necessarily created as a study for multifigural works like The Beloved Mother, as has often been assumed. The Dreamer is only one of a whole series that Greuze made of such beautiful creatures, presented to us as if inches away, variously aware or unaware of our presence, and all at life-size on a wide rectangular format of around eighteen by fifteen inches.
We hover between the compelling illusion of the psychological complexity of a “real” and, hence, unknowable mind just beyond the picture plane, and the admiration we must have for the artist’s skill: one more fictional repetition of a type that the artist has refined yet again, this time for a personification of one of the most valued attributes of the mind in the eighteenth century, Attention.25
Unfortunately, the titles of Greuze’s expressive heads, unless documented by reproductive prints that we know were produced under his direction, are difficult to track. They may be the inventions of nineteenth-century or, as we shall see, even modern-day auctioneers, who would have known the appeal of such literary devices for collectors interested in having a Greuze Girl of their very own.
In the Rosenberg version of The Dreamer, the young woman’s interior state of mind is made deliberately unreadable. In fact, her detachment, which perhaps prompted the otherwise unlikely title, is the main subject of the image. Even if the strategic deshabille was meant to satisfy the aims of voyeurism, the young woman’s eyes remain lost to us. We can easily project any number of emotions onto her relaxed facial muscles and distracted, unblinking gaze: Is she melancholic? Lost in a daydream, as the title given by the auction catalogue suggests? Or is her expression that of a bored studio model, hardened to the routine task of having her body displayed and manipulated for best pictorial effect? This kind of represented self-absorption is something Greuze would have learned, again, from Chardin, whose pensive scullery maids often radiate exactly the same kind of psychological inaccessibility.26
In the end, the question of how to categorize Greuze’s expressive heads of attractive young women—whether as fantasy figures, as studies of actual studio models, or as members of his family—is important only because these paintings continually beg the question in the first place. Greuze’s most successful “types,” knowingly propagated by the artist through strategic repetition in exhibited sketches, pastels, and reproductive prints, are the eighteenth-century equivalent of successful modern-day actors and actresses. We recognize them as “real” people, and easily disengage their features from any given role. At the same time, their association with the most memorable fictional characters they have played in the past often triggers our recognition of the emotional moods and thoughts of the current role they inhabit. Put another way, Greuze’s figural “types,” through repetition in a variety of narrative contexts, become floating signifiers, whose meaning is readily replenished because of the verisimilitude already cued by the particularities of their visual appearance.
WATTEAU and CONTEXT (copied into the "Fete Galante and the Academy" CC
Enlightenment attraction to subject matter that erodes superficial genre distinctions, a phenomenon often said to be announced by Antoine Watteau’s unprecedented 1717 reception into the Academy as a specialist of the fête galante. This was a category of painting Watteau invented to suit his allegories of love featuring courtly men and women set in an idyllic landscape, loosely resembling seventeenth-century Venetian and Flemish prototypes. Neither history painting, nor pure landscape, Watteau’s reception piece (see fig. 32, p. 45) has the air of allegory, although precisely of whom and for what remains a matter of debate. Such generic slippage increasingly comes to dominate French painting, particularly in the second half of the century.
Excerpt from
Eik Kahng, "Greuze's The Dreamer: Portrait, Tronie, or Fantasy Figure?" 125-140, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, (French, 1725–1805)
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
c. 1765-1769
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
rules
Apply To
Objects
id
Equals
5325714
source file
object_notes_1_b-0129.xml.nores