Knabe mit verblühten Löwenzahn

A boy holding a wilted or gone-to-seed dandelion belongs to Greuze's series of children with natural objects — wilting flowers, dying birds, broken pitchers — all of which participate in his characteristic moralizing language of transience and innocence lost. The spent dandelion, whose seeds have blown away, carries obvious associations with the passing of time and the fragility of beauty — concerns central to Greuze's sentimental worldview and to the broader culture of sensibilité in pre-Revolutionary France. Such images were small and relatively affordable, making them widely accessible to middle-class collectors who could not afford his large narrative canvases.

Greuze's precise rendering of the dandelion's delicate structure — each spent seed head described with botanical attention — contrasts with the softer modeling of the boy's face, creating a tension between natural detail and psychological expression that is characteristic of his tête d'expression format.