handing over the Marriage-portion of his Daughter” was the first title of this picture, and one which better, if less poetically, explains the scene. The homely ceremony takes place in the picturesque living room of a big cottage or small farm, and twelve people take part in it. Backed up by the village functionary, who has drawn up the contract, the old father is evidently giving some good advice as he places the bag of money in the hands of his future son-in-law. The young man listens respectfully, the shy but proud young bride hanging on to his arm. The mother has taken one of her daughter’s hands, while a younger sister leans her head on the bride’s shoulder. Children play about in various attitudes among a family of fowls who feed in the foreground. Though it has some of the faults of those which followed it, this is undoubtedly the best subject-picture painted by Greuze. The composition is good, it is well drawn, full of a charming tender sentiment, and the head of the fiancée, foreshadowing Greuze’s future successes, is delicious, fully deserving Gautier’s eulogy: “It is impossible to find anything younger, fresher, more innocent, and more coquettishly virginal, if the two words may be connected, than this head.”

Preaching the beauty of family life, the sacredness of marriage, and the virtues and happiness of the humble, “L’Accordée du Village” raised a furore. Its material success was equally great. It was sold for 9000 livres, and later, in 1780, it was bought for the Cabinet du Roi for 16,650 livres.

Very much less successful from the artistic point of view were the two well-known pictures now in the Louvre, which appeared three or four years later, “La Malédiction paternelle” and—a sequel—“Le Fils puni.”

The first shows the vicious and debauched son trying to tear himself from the grasp of an agonised mother and little brother, to go away with the colour-sergeant who is waiting near the door. While the mother pleads, the father, unable to move from the chair in which illness holds him, storms, and with hands violently outstretched, pronounces the curse that terrifies the other shuddering members of the family.

The punishment is shown in the second picture, when the repentant son, shabby and travel-stained, returns to find his father dead. His stick fallen from his trembling hands, his knees giving way beneath him, one hand on his heart, the other pressed convulsively to his forehead, he stands helpless at the foot of the bed on which the dead man lies. Beside him stands his mother, pointing tragically to the corpse, with an air of saying, “Behold your work!” The other members of the family are too occupied with their own sorrow to notice him, and give way to their despair in various attitudes.

The artificiality of pose and gesture more than suggested in “L’Accordée du Village” is here exaggerated into cheap theatricalness. In “Le Fils puni,” for example, the attitude of the Prodigal, and the Lady Macbeth pose of the classically-draped mother, are impossible, and the outstretched arms, the heaven-turned eyes, and open mouths of the others are almost offensive. This exaggeration defeats its own object. You feel that these dramatis personæ are only posing, tableau-vivant fashion, to impress, and they do not do it well enough to excite anything but criticism in you. The colour is bad, heavy, and dull. The draperies hang in stiff folds, without suppleness.

These two canvases are arrangements, not pictures; and in spite of certain gracious qualities which always charm in Greuze, all the others of the long series that followed can be dismissed with the same criticism.

Such was not the opinion of Diderot, the painter’s most admiring critic and friend. He could not find words in which to adequately praise productions that proved such “great qualities of the heart, and such good morals.”

“Beautiful! Very beautiful! Sublime! Courage, my friend Greuze; continue always to paint such subjects, so that when you come to die there will be nothing you have painted you can recall without pleasure.”

“Le Paralytique, ou la Piété filiale,” “Le Fruit d’une bonne Education,” now in the celebrated Hermitage Gallery in Russia, “La Bénédiction paternelle,” are further examples of this series of the ten commandments turned badly into paint and canvas, and less interesting still are subjects of the order of “The Torn Will,” falling, as they do, into the form of the cheapest melodrama.

PLATE IV.—PORTRAIT D’HOMME

A very good example of Greuze as a portraitist. This picture is in the Louvre, and is remarkable for its delicate harmonious colouring and the living expression in the eyes. The man seems to be listening to some one, and on the point of opening his mouth to reply.

CHAPTER IV
THE PICTURES BY WHICH WE KNOW GREUZE

From time to time during these years Greuze had painted children’s heads that gave evidence of the real character of his talent, and in 1765, the year of “La Malédiction paternelle,” he produced “Le Baiser envoyé,” now in London in the collection of the Baron Alfred de Rothschild.

“Le Baiser envoyé,” or “The Kiss,” represents a young woman leaning forward among the flowers of her window-sill to throw a kiss to her departing lover. The beautiful form, the charming curved face, all instinctive with tenderness and longing, the grace of the attitude, the tapering fingers, the arrangement of the framing draperies, combine to make this one of the most exquisitely graceful of his pictures, and one that would alone have proved his surpassing talent for portraying a certain type of woman. No wonder the charmed beholders turned to ask each other whether this moral painter was not at his best when his subjects were not moral!

Of course there is nothing immoral about “The Kiss,” only Greuze had been so praised for his preacher work, it was only natural he should be criticised when he produced “La Voluptueuse,” as he first called this picture. Of the appropriateness of the title there can be no doubt. The lovely kiss-thrower absolutely respires voluptuousness; moreover, there is hardly a female figure of Greuze, except those showing very early childhood, that does not suggest this characteristic. Even when the eyes of his very young girls are candid and clear with innocence, the pouting lips of the half-opened mouths are sensuous, the swelling bosom and rounded throat suggestive, the attitude provoking. In short, the impression given, if wholly seductive, is invariably complex, troubled, full of a certain delicate corruption—see “Innocence” or “Fidelity” in the Wallace Collection in London. “A moralist with a passion for lovely shoulders, a preacher who wants to see and show the bosoms of young girls,” is how he has been described.

Not that any one cared. On the contrary, every one, moralists included, was libertine in the eighteenth century, and “deshabillé et désir” only stamped a painter as being the mirror of his times. So Greuze’s name took on still