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Girl with Birds
Jean-Baptiste Greuze·c. 1780/1782
Historical Context
Jean-Baptiste Greuze's genre paintings of young girls with pets and birds occupied a deliberately ambiguous zone between childhood innocence and emergent sexuality that contemporary audiences read through the lens of sentimental philosophy. Diderot, Greuze's most important critical champion, celebrated his moralizing genre scenes as achieving the emotional power of history painting while remaining accessible to ordinary viewers. Girl with Birds belongs to the series of vulnerable-looking girls that made Greuze fashionable with aristocratic and bourgeois collectors alike in the 1770s and 1780s, before the Revolution disrupted the patronage networks he depended on. Circle versions demonstrate the commercial viability of a formula that combined sentimentality, technical refinement, and the faintly erotic appeal that distinguished his work within the French genre tradition.
Technical Analysis
The oil on canvas adopts Greuze's characteristic soft, warm palette and his formula of a pretty young woman in a three-quarter pose with expressive, slightly tearful eyes. The smooth modeling and the sentimental treatment of the subject follow his established pictorial conventions.
Provenance
Russian Imperial Family, Pavlovsky Palace, near St. Petersburg, by 1837[1] until at least 1920.[2] William R. Timken [1866-1949], New York; by inheritance to his widow, Lillian Guyer Timken [1881-1959], New York; bequest 1960 to NGA. [1] According to John Smith, _A Catalogue raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French painters..._, 9 vols., London, 1829-1842: 8(1837): 438, no. 147. [2] According to Camille Mauclair, _Jean-Baptiste Greuze_, Paris, 1905: no. 795. See also Louis Réau, "Greuze et la Russie," _L'art et les artistes_, n.s. 7 (1920): 282 n. 2. Both Wildenstein & Co. and NGA curatorial files have an old photograph of the painting with the notation "Glouzonoff (former Mayor Petrograd)" on the back. However, this owner has not been identified, nor is it know when and from whom the Timkens acquired the painting.
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