Master draftsmanship of Greuze on display

NEW YORK, June 27 (UPI) -- Jean-Baptiste Greuze had the outstanding talent as an artist to become a court painter of romantic landscapes and royal portraits, but he preferred instead to picture more humble subjects reflecting domestic joys and tribulations, which have made him one of the least appreciated major French artists of the 18th century.

An exhibition of works on paper titled "Greuze the Draftsman" at the Frick Collection, to run through Aug. 4, should go a long way toward putting Greuze (1725-1805) in the company of Jean Honore Fragonard, Francois Boucher, Jean Antoine Watteau, and Jacques Louis David where he belongs, along with that other great portrayer of everyday life, J.P.S. Chardin.

Greuze and Chardin offered the public an antidote to the excesses of Rococo art, the ornate and morally corrupt style of the day. Chardin is universally admired, but amazingly enough, this is the first show ever devoted to Greuze's graphic oeuvre. It includes examples of all the media he employed, including pencil, chalk, pastel, ink, gouache, and watercolor.

Greuze's unmatched technical skill on view in 70 paintings from museums around the world including the Louvre in Paris, the Albertina in Vienna, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, which houses Catherine the Great's collection of Greuze's work. The exhibit will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where it opens Sept. 10.

Some of the finest works are from private collections never before seen, such as the l765 ravishingly beautiful red chalk sketch "Head of a Woman" depicting post-orgasmic ecstasy with a bluntness that no other painter has ever dared. It is believed to be a preparatory sketch for Greuze's painting, "La Volupte" for which his wife is supposed to have posed.

The exhibit is also notable for gathering together a group of chalk drawings called "Studies in Expression" of faces that show subtle and not-so-subtle expressions of complex emotion. Philosopher, novelist, and encyclopedist Denis Diderot, one of Greuze's greatest admirers, wrote that the artist searched the streets for characters to draw, and "If he meets a head that strikes him, he would willingly fall on his knees before the bearer of that head to attract him to the studio."

Greuze's portrait of Diderot, who had praised the artist as a man of genius in his review of the Paris Salon exhibit of 1769, is one of the most arresting drawings in the show. Drawn in black and white chalks on brown paper, it bears out Diderot's own description of himself, "High forehead, lively eyes, rather large features, a head totally in character of an ancient orator," without flattering his friend in any way.

Even the one royal commission that came Greuze's way, a red and black chalk portrait drawing of Louis-Philippe, Duke d'Orleans, does not flatter, but portrays the king's cousin as a swaggering, self-important fop. When it came to drawing a self portrait in ink, Greuze was just as direct, but he emphasized his fashionable "pigeon's wings" hairdo to please a mistress for whom it was drawn.

Born in Burgundy, Greuze got an early start by studying in Lyon with an artist influenced by the realist Dutch tradition. By the time he was 25, he was in Paris where he worked hard to win associate membership in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture five years later. He won commissions from important patrons, including Madame de Pompadour's brother, but always remained something of an outsider.

Greuze married a beautiful and wealthy woman but early domestic bliss soon deteriorated into domestic warfare. Legal documents from the artist describe how he saw "in the glow of a night light Madame Greuze about to smash my head with a chamber pot." That altercation inspired his ink 1785 ink drawing, "The Angry Wife."

The show has an abundance of such genre, or story-telling, pictures depicting sentimental, moralizing subjects with the titles "A Marriage Contract," "The Guilty and Repentant Daughter," "The Angry Mother," "The Father's Curse: The Punished Son," "The Torn-Up Will," and "The Death of a Cruel Father, Abandoned by His Children." But the most important genre subject, on which he worked for years, with many chalk and ink sketches in the show to prove it, was "The Beloved Mother."

These preparatory sketches are for a painting done for the Marquis de Laborde that was reproduced as an engraving and became one of Greuze's most popular and financially rewarding prints, a main source of revenue for artists of the day. "The Beloved Mother" shows a young mother (Laborde's wife) overwhelmed by the caresses of six small children while her elderly mother looks on, gleefully laughing in appreciation.

A separate pastel of the head of the Marquise de Laborde derived from the composition was recently acquired by the National Gallery and is one of the most spectacular works in the show, notable for tonal passages across the forehead, cheeks, neck and bosom. It is one of art's great depictions of pleasure mingled with pain, in this case the exhaustion that comes with motherhood.

Other drawings in the show take on classic themes, such as a study of a vestal virgin, the funeral of Patroklos attended by Achilles, the arrest of the Gaul, Sabinus, by Emperor Vespasian, and Anacreon crowned by love. There is a one example of Greuze's work as a book illustrator, a gray ink wash over a pencil sketch for John Baskerville's sumptuous 1770 edition of Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso."

The final exhibit is a self portrait submitted by Greuze to the Salon of 1804, the year before he died, an oil on a wood panel showing the artist as frail but confidant, a crayon holder with white chalk in his hand identifying himself as a draftsman. It was about this time when he wrote one of his patrons, "I have lost everything but talent and courage."

A catalog with 350 illustrations accompanies the show ("Greuze the Draftsman," Merrell Publishers, 284 pages, $75).