Artist · 14 prints
Jean-Baptiste Greuze Prints
About Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a French painter, born in Tournus in 1725, who died in Paris in 1805. He trained first in Lyon and then at the Royal Academy in Paris. He made his debut at the Paris Salon in 1755 to immediate success, and he travelled to Italy that same year.
Greuze is known for scenes of everyday family life, full of feeling and a touch of theatre, which suited the 18th-century taste for sentiment and virtue. The writer Denis Diderot, whom he met in 1759, encouraged this style, and The Village Betrothal (1761) was warmly received at the Salon. In 1769 he hoped to join the Academy as a history painter, the most respected rank, with Septimius Severus Reproaching Caracalla, but was admitted only as a painter of everyday scenes. Stung, he showed his work in his own studio for years afterward. By the 1780s his style had gone out of fashion and his income became precarious.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze prints: reproductions of paintings by the French painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze, made between 1756 and 1800. The collection includes Le Petit Mathématicien (1780), Broken Eggs (1756), The Broken Mirror (1762), The Laundress (1761) and Woman with Doves (1799).
This selection focuses on Greuze's single figures and small domestic scenes: children, young women and household moments, several of which hint at a moral story, such as Broken Eggs and The Broken Mirror. It also includes portraits of adults, among them Ange Laurent de La Live de Jully (1759) and Madame Jean-Baptiste Nicolet (1787), and one mythological painting, Aegina Visited by Jupiter (1767).
The close-up portraits of children and young women, in soft creams, reds and blues, suit bedrooms, nurseries, reading corners and hallways; the larger scenes fit a living room or dining room. All prints are museum-quality reproductions, available unframed or framed with acrylic glazing, with free shipping and import duties covered.
