La Prière du matin

La Prière du matin — The Morning Prayer — belongs to the domestic devotional genre that Greuze explored alongside his secular subjects. A young woman at morning prayer satisfied multiple pictorial and social demands: it demonstrated feminine piety, provided an occasion for a figure in partial dishabille, and participated in the sentimental culture of private religious feeling that was commercially robust in eighteenth-century France. Greuze's morning prayer scenes locate religious practice within the bedchamber rather than the church, privatizing devotion in a way that was specifically modern and specifically feminine.

The morning light from an unseen window falls across the praying figure with the soft diffusion that Greuze favored for domestic intimacy — softer and more enveloping than the spotlight effects of academic painting. The folded hands and upcast eyes are rendered with his characteristic emotional precision.