Girl with Music Book

Girls with musical instruments formed a standard format in eighteenth-century French painting — Chardin, Fragonard, and Greuze all produced images of young women at lessons or practicing accomplishments. For Greuze the music book served a double function: it demonstrated female cultivation and provided an occasion for the downcast eyes, slightly open mouth, and concentrated expression that he favored for their suggestion of inward absorption. Music study was a marker of bourgeois female education, and these paintings both documented and idealized the domestic culture of instruction and refinement.

Greuze deploys the music book as a compositional anchor in the lower half of the canvas, allowing him to position the girl's hands and downcast gaze in relation to the page while the face remains half-lit by an overhead light source. His characteristically smooth skin modeling gives the face a polished warmth.