Portrait de Charles-Paul-Jean-Baptiste de Bourgevin de Vialart de Saint-Morys, conseiller à la Grand-Chambre du Parlement de Paris

Jean-Baptiste Greuze's portrait of Charles-Paul-Jean-Baptiste de Bourgevin de Vialart de Saint-Morys, a Parlement counselor (c. 1765), belongs to a period when Greuze was attempting to establish himself as a serious portraitist alongside his celebrated moralizing genre scenes. Saint-Morys was a member of the Parisian legal establishment, a connoisseur, and collector. Greuze's portraits of the bourgeois intelligentsia have the same psychological directness as his domestic genre scenes, capturing the sitters' self-regard with a mixture of flattery and honesty that distinguished him from more purely ceremonial court portraitists.

The oil portrait on canvas shows Greuze's characteristic attention to the sitter's physiognomy — the face is rendered with sculptural precision using his tightly controlled impasto. Three-quarter pose against a neutral ground focuses attention on character. The legal robe indicates status without elaborate decorative display.