Jean-Baptiste Greuze

French painter
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Quick Facts
Born:
Aug. 21, 1725, Tournus, France
Died:
March 21, 1805, Paris (aged 79)

Jean-Baptiste Greuze (born Aug. 21, 1725, Tournus, France—died March 21, 1805, Paris) was a French genre and portrait painter who initiated a mid-18th-century vogue for sentimental and moralizing anecdotes in paintings. Greuze studied first at Lyon and afterward at the Royal Academy in Paris. He first exhibited at the Salon of 1755 and won an immediate success with his moralizing genre painting of Father Reading the Bible to His Children (1755). Although Greuze’s attention at this time was fixed on a less-pretentious type of genre painting in which the influence of 17th-century Dutch masters is apparent, the favourable attention he ...(100 of 304 words)