Young Boy

This Young Boy from around 1765 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exemplifies Greuze's empathetic depictions of childhood that contributed to the evolving eighteenth-century understanding of children as individuals with their own emotional lives rather than miniature adults. Greuze's oil technique produced smooth, carefully modelled surfaces for his sentimental figure subjects, with particular attention to the expressive rendering of faces—weeping eyes, parted lips—that combined academic...

The boy's vivid expression is captured through precise observation of the eyes and mouth, with warm flesh tones built up through the characteristic Greuze technique of translucent glazes.