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- Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725 - 1805)
- Girl in a White Dress
- France
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- Date: c.1765
- Object Type: Painting
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Image size: 45.6 x 37.6 cm
- Inv: P427
- Location: Boudoir
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- Description
- Provenance
- Further Reading
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- Like many painters, Greuze had produced studies of individual heads as drawings and in oil from early in his career. Some of them were nature studies, others specifically prepared figures in his larger narrative paintings. From the late 1770s, these 'expressive heads' developed into a separate genre, often erotically charged, and into a main field of his activities. Greuze's heads exist in large numbers, and he developed them more systematically after he had fallen out with the Academy. Many of them were executed by studio members, and there are general questions of attribution concerning the group.
Greuze expressed his period's interest in strong emotions and sentiments. Expressive heads had a long tradition in France, starting from the teachings of Charles Lebrun who, in 1668, had proposed to codify the expression of specific passions in an Academy lecture.
This work is one of Greuze's most impressive head studies and a very early work of the series, before Greuze developed their commercial character. It might be one of the works Greuze exhibited at the Salon of 1765.
- Like many painters, Greuze had produced studies of individual heads as drawings and in oil from early in his career. Some of them were nature studies, others specifically prepared figures in his larger narrative paintings. From the late 1770s, these 'expressive heads' developed into a separate genre, often erotically charged, and into a main field of his activities. Greuze's heads exist in large numbers, and he developed them more systematically after he had fallen out with the Academy. Many of them were executed by studio members, and there are general questions of attribution concerning the group.