Reading the Bible

Greuze painted Reading the Bible around 1755, an early genre work depicting a domestic scene of collective religious reading in which a family or group gathers around the scripture. The subject was standard material for the moralizing domestic genre — private religious practice as an emblem of household virtue — but Greuze's treatment already shows his ability to charge apparently simple domestic subjects with psychological and moral content through the careful observation of individual faces and gestures. The work anticipates the more elaborately staged moral domestic scenes that would make his reputation in the 1760s while demonstrating his early engagement with the didactic genre tradition.

Greuze arranges the multi-generational family around the central figure of the reading patriarch, with each member responding differently. The warm interior light and careful rendering of rural domestic detail create a convincing scene of bourgeois piety.