Portrait de jeune fille

This portrait of a young girl from around 1795 shows Greuze continuing his signature subject through the turbulent Revolutionary years. The Musée Cognacq-Jay, which houses this work, specializes in eighteenth-century French art and holds several important examples of Greuze's têtes d'expression. 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...

The intimate bust-length format and softly modeled features demonstrate Greuze's consistent technique of building luminous flesh tones through layers of translucent paint.