Head of a Young Boy

Head of a Young Boy from 1763, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dates from the year before Greuze's disastrous attempt to be received into the Académie royale as a history painter rather than as a genre painter — an ambition that ended in the public humiliation of 1769. In 1763 Greuze was still at the height of his reputation, celebrated by Diderot in the Salon reviews as the most morally serious French painter of his generation. The child's head belongs to the category of sympathetic observation of childhood that ran throughout his career alongside his moralizing genre scenes, reflecting the influence of Rousseau's educational philosophy in its insistence on the natural goodness and innocence of children. Diderot had compared Greuze's children to Raphael's, and the Metropolitan head demonstrates the quality that provoked this extravagant praise: the extraordinary vivid observation of a child's features — bright eyes, open expression, the natural grace of unself-conscious childhood — rendered with a technical virtuosity that made the living personality seem to breathe within the painted surface.

The boy's features are rendered with vivid naturalism, the warm flesh tones and lively expression captured through Greuze's characteristic technique of layered glazes over a warm ground.