File:Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers (1899) (14761830146).jpg

Identifier: greatpicturesassx00sing (find matches)
Title: Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930, ed. and tr
Subjects: Painting
Publisher: New York : Dodd, Mead and Company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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re. This is the truth, but seen,however, through an interpretation and under a travesty ofrusticity. All is reasoned out, full of purpose, and leadingto an end. There is in every stroke what the litterateurscall ideas when they talk about painting. Thus Diderothas celebrated Greuze in the most lyric strain. Greuze,however, is not a mediocre artist: he invented a genreunknown before his time, and he possesses veritable quali-ties of a painter. He has colour, he has touch, and hisheads, modelled by square plans and, so to speak, by facets,have relief and life. His draperies, or rather his rumpledlinen, torn and treated grossly in a systematic fashionto give full value to the delicacy of the flesh, reveal intheir very negligence an easy brush. La MaUdktion Pater-nelle and Le Fils Maudit are homilies that are well paintedand of a practical moral, but we prefer VAccordee duVillage^ on account of the adorable head of the fiancee; itis impossible to find anything younger, fresher, more inno-
Text Appearing After Image:
La Cruche Cassee. Grcuze. LA CRUCHE CASSEE 281 cent and more coquettishly virginal, if these two wordsmay be connected. Greuze, and this is the cause of therenown which he enjoys now after the eclipse of his glorycaused by the intervention of David and his school, has avery individual talent for painting woman in her first bloom,when the bud is about to burst into the rose and the childis about to become a maiden. As in the Eighteenth Cen-tury all the world was somewhat libertine, even the moral-ists, Greuze, when he painted an Innocence, always tookpains to open the gauze and give a glimpse of the curve ofthe swelling bosom; he puts into the eyes a fiery lustre andupon the lips a dewy smile that suggests the idea that Inno-cence might very easily become Voluptuousness. La Cruche Cassee is the model of this genre. The headhas still the innocence of childhood, but the fichu is dis-arranged, the rose at the corsage is dropping its leaves, theflowers are only half held in the fold of the

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