Girl with a Doll

Girl with a Doll from around 1750 is an early work showing Greuze's emerging interest in childhood subjects. The theme of a child absorbed in play with a toy anticipates the sentimentalized depictions of childhood that would become central to his art and to broader cultural shifts in attitudes toward children during the Enlightenment. The erotic charge beneath Greuze's apparently moral female subjects—disheveled hair, parted lips, unguarded expressions—scandalized moralists and delighted collectors simultaneously, making him simultaneously the most praised and most criticized French painter of the 1760s.

The relatively tight handling and muted palette suggest Greuze's early manner, before the more confident and luminous technique of his mature period developed through the 1760s.