 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Filial Piety (The Paralytic) 1763 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"My friend, I know what I'm talking about. Isn't The Paralytic, his painting of the reward earned by having educated one's children properly, still in his studio? And it's a masterpiece of the art. Word of it reached the court, it was sent for, it was much admired, but it wasn't purchased, and it cost the artist twenty ecus to obtain the inestimable privilege . . . But I've said enough, I'm becoming ill-humored, in this state I could even get myself into trouble."
– Denis Diderot, from the Salon of 1765
Diderot was unofficial art adviser at this period to his friend, Catherine the Great of Russia. Thus it was no coincidence when the painting he praised (at the expense of the Bourbon court) was purchased directly from the artist by Catherine's agents and shipped to Saint Petersburg, where it remains. This peculiar mid-18th century French painting-genre of the "edifying family tableau" was exactly suited to Diderot's taste for secularized moral uplift. He in fact wrote a pair of unreadable plays that exactly echoed the sentimentalized domesticity of Greuze.
Several preparatory drawings for The Paralytic are also preserved at the Hermitage. Perhaps Greuze included these when shipping the painting from Paris to Russia –
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Study for The Paralytic ca. 1760 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Study for The Paralytic ca. 1760 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Study for The Paralytic c. 1760 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Study for The Paralytic ca. 1760 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Study for The Paralytic ca. 1760 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Study for The Paralytic ca. 1760 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Study for The Paralytic ca. 1760 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Girl with doll 1750s oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Girl arranging her hair 1760s drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Head of young woman before 1769 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Head of woman in nightcap 1772 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Head of woman in swoon 1760s drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
 |
| Jean-Baptiste Greuze Head of woman in hood 1760s drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"And then there's Greuze, who's certainly the best in his genre; who draws, who imagines, who colors, who's skilled and has ideas."
– Denis Diderot, from the Salon of 1767 (Yale University Press, 1995)
"Thus a painter like Greuze found himself compelled to depart ever more drastically from the formal and expressive norms of Chardin's art in order to persuade contemporary audiences of the absorption of the dramatis personae in the world of the painting, earning for his most resourceful efforts the scorn and incomprehension of later generations."
– Michael Fried, from Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (University of California Press, 1980)