First Lesson in Love

Greuze painted First Lesson in Love around 1760, during the period when his sentimental genre scenes of young women and children made him one of the most celebrated painters in Paris. Denis Diderot championed these works in his Salon reviews, praising their moral feeling, though modern viewers note the undercurrent of eroticism beneath their outward innocence. Characteristic of Greuze's approach, the work displays emotionally expressive figures, theatrical lighting, combining Rococo charm with didactic purpose.

The soft sfumato modeling of flesh and the warm, limited palette are characteristic of Greuze's genre manner, derived from Dutch seventeenth-century precedents but filtered through French Rococo sensibility.