A Boy with a Lesson-book

Greuze's boy with a lesson book inverts his more famous images of youthful delinquency — the broken eggs, the dead canary — by presenting study and application as subjects of pictorial attention. The lesson book suggests the educational aspirations of the French bourgeoisie for its male children, aspirations that Greuze served as assiduously as he served their taste for moral narrative. The boy's expression — earnest, concentrated, perhaps slightly bored — humanizes what could otherwise be a didactic image, giving it the psychological ambiguity that elevates Greuze's best genre work above mere moralizing.

Greuze positions the book as a horizontal base for the composition, the boy's slightly slumped posture and working-class clothing creating a contrast with the intellectual aspiration the book represents. His handling of the face is more restrained than in his expressive head studies, giving this boy a convincing pedestrian concentration.