Guitarist

Jean-Baptiste Greuze painted Guitarist around 1757, one of his early genre works depicting a young man absorbed in playing the guitar — a leisure activity that combined the period's enthusiasm for music with the informal domestic settings that would become Greuze's specialty. The single-figure musician at leisure was a standard genre subject derived from the Dutch tradition, and Greuze's treatment shows his early command of the format before his fully mature moralizing domestic scenes. The warm, informal setting and the sitter's absorbed self-sufficiency anticipate the intimate psychological observation that would characterize his later genre paintings and the female heads that made him the most commercially successful genre painter in Paris.

Greuze renders the young musician with the soft, luminous flesh tones and careful attention to expression that characterize his best work. The warm palette and tender handling create an atmosphere of youthful absorption in music.