Vert-Vert

François Fleury-Richard's Vert-Vert (1804) illustrates the eponymous parrot who is the hero of a popular mock-heroic poem by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset (1734) — a pampered convent parrot shipped by boat to visit another convent, corrupted during the voyage by the boatmen's crude language, and punished on arrival before being rehabilitated and mourned at his death. The poem was one of the most widely read light poems of eighteenth-century France, and Fleury-Richard's treatment places it in a charming convent interior setting that suits both the poem's gentle comedy and the Troubadour Style's preference for intimate historical scenes. The work is at the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon.

Fleury-Richard renders the convent interior with his characteristic warm precision — the light falling through high windows, the nuns in their habits, the architectural stone detail — while the parrot provides the painting's comic centre. The palette is warm and agreeable, the handling careful without being laboured, consistent with the light-hearted literary subject.