L'Effroi

L'Effroi (Fright) from around 1775, now in the Louvre, captures a moment of sudden alarm in one of Greuze's expressive female heads. The dramatic emotional states depicted in these works influenced later Romantic artists and anticipated the 19th-century fascination with extreme psychological expression that would find systematic treatment in the physiognomic theories of Lavater and eventually in the scientific studies of facial expression by Duchenne de Boulogne. Greuze had been inspired by the tradition of expression studies going back to Le Brun's 17th-century treatise on the passions, but where Le Brun's academic system classified emotions schematically, Greuze rendered them with the warmth and specificity of observed experience. The Louvre holds L'Effroi as part of its comprehensive collection of Greuze's work, and the painting belongs among his most intense têtes d'expression — the head studies that demonstrated his claim to be not merely a genre painter but a practitioner of the psychological observation that academic theory placed at the summit of the painter's art. Wide eyes and open mouth convey shock with the luminous precision that was his signature technical achievement.

Wide eyes and an open mouth convey shock, modeled with Greuze's signature luminous flesh technique against a dark background that heightens the dramatic impact.