Buste du paralytique

Greuze built his career on moralized genre scenes but also produced a substantial body of head studies — busts of young women, old men, and social types that allowed collectors to acquire his expressive power without the expensive large-format narrative paintings. This study of a paralytic belongs to the charitable empathy side of his moralizing project, a pendant to his images of filial piety and peasant virtue. Greuze's old and afflicted figures function as tests of his viewers' sympathy, inviting identification with suffering in a way that served both sentimental and didactic ends.

Greuze's handling of the elderly, afflicted face deploys his precise command of tonal modeling — skin loosened by age and illness built up through carefully gradated transitions from highlight to shadow. The expression of resignation or suffering is rendered through subtle adjustments to the mouth and eyes that reveal his deep study of physiognomy.