Portrait of the Artist's Wife

This early portrait of Greuze's wife Anne-Gabrielle Babuty dates from around the time of their marriage in 1759. The relationship was notoriously unhappy—Greuze later accused her of infidelity and financial recklessness, and they separated in 1793. Early in their marriage, however, she served as model for several of his most admired paintings. The erotic charge beneath Greuze's apparently moral female subjects—disheveled hair, parted lips, unguarded expressions—scandalized moralists and delighted collectors simultaneously, making him simultaneously the most praised and most criticized French painter of the 1760s.

The intimate scale and warm coloring reveal Greuze's affinity for Northern European portrait traditions, particularly the domestic intimacy of Dutch seventeenth-century painting.