The Hermit, or 'The Distributor Of Rosaries'

The Hermit, or The Distributor of Rosaries by Jean-Baptiste Greuze from around 1765 exemplifies the moralizing genre painting that made Greuze the most celebrated French painter of the pre-Revolutionary era. Diderot championed Greuze’s narrative paintings as exemplars of moral art, praising their ability to instruct while they entertained. 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.

Greuze’s technique combines precise figure drawing with warm, atmospheric handling. His rendering of facial expressions and gestures creates the narrative clarity that Diderot admired as painting’s moral equivalent of theater.