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- Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725 - 1805)
- Une jeune Fille qui fait sa prière au pied de l'autel de l'Amour (A Young Woman Praying at the Altar of Love)
- France
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- Date: 1767
- Object Type: Painting
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Image size: 145.5 x 113 cm
- Inv: P441
- Location: Study
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- Description
- Provenance
- Further Reading
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- The painting marks a turning point in Greuze's career. Provisionally accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1755, he subsequently became the most celebrated painter in France and Europe more generally with his moralising scenes of middle-class family life such as 'L'Accordée de village' (Paris, Musee du Louvre) which caused a sensation when it was exhibited in the Salon of 1761. In 1769, he elected to submit, as his formal reception piece, a history painting ('Septimius Severus Reproaching Caracalla'; Paris, Musee du Louvre) instead of one of the genre scene for which he was so famous. However the members of the Academy only accepted him as a genre painter. Furious, Greuze refrained from exhibiting at the Salon exhibition until 1800.
The present work was one of several classical subjects Greuze exhibited at the 1769 Salon in a clear demonstration of his ambition to be recognized as a history painter. Greuze researched his subject carefully: the statue of Cupid for example derives from an engraving in Pierre-Jean Mariette’s 'Traité des pierres gravées' of 1750. Unfortunately, the ambitious canvas was subjected to critical backlash. It was criticised for its spatial inconsistencies and clumsy figures by the critics, most violently by the philosopher Denis Diderot. Nonetheless, the picture was acquired by the discerning duc de Choiseul who hung it in his bedroom. Greuze's panting was among the first examples of a subject that became highly popular in late eighteenth-century French painting.
- The painting marks a turning point in Greuze's career. Provisionally accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1755, he subsequently became the most celebrated painter in France and Europe more generally with his moralising scenes of middle-class family life such as 'L'Accordée de village' (Paris, Musee du Louvre) which caused a sensation when it was exhibited in the Salon of 1761. In 1769, he elected to submit, as his formal reception piece, a history painting ('Septimius Severus Reproaching Caracalla'; Paris, Musee du Louvre) instead of one of the genre scene for which he was so famous. However the members of the Academy only accepted him as a genre painter. Furious, Greuze refrained from exhibiting at the Salon exhibition until 1800.