It’s not a gallant scene

She looks at you with her huge, innocent eyes, discreetly filled with fear. Her complexion is porcelain, and from her silky bodice emerges the nipple of a small milky breast. Her appearance is dishevelled. A scarf lies carelessly around her neck. The rose tucked into her corset is half stripped of its petals. Could this very young creature be the heroine of one of those gallant scenes such as 18th-century France produced so many of? In fact, no.

The kitsch reading

Until 25 January, the Petit Palais museum is presenting an exhibition devoted to Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), an artist whose output, especially portraits of children, long invaded, in France, the tops of cheap chocolate boxes. But the director of the Petit Palais is offering an exhibition that completely runs counter to the kitsch reading one might have of the Frenchman’s work.

Annick Lemoine

For Annick Lemoine, Greuze is a humanist artist who takes an interest in children and in how they are represented at a time when they are kept on the sidelines. “Together with the encyclopaedists Diderot and d’Alembert, who are his friends, he is convinced that the child, and his education, represent the promise of a better society.”In this instance, then, the portrait of this lovely little girl with sad eyes—one of the most striking paintings among the hundred works by the master shown at the Petit Palais—is an only barely coded representation of a rape scene.

 Broken pitcher

First of all because the painting is called The Broken Pitcher. The girl, who is certainly a maid, carries on her arm a pot split wide open, a bitter relic of a violent episode. Does one really need to spell out the symbolism, in the background of the painting, of a fountain in the shape of a dark grey lion—in contrast with the pastel tones of the canvas—spouting its liquid? One will also notice, right in the foreground, at the level of her pubis, the crumpled folds of the girl’s dress gathered into a ball, holding back wilted flowers. Deflowered she is.

Indecent proposal

As one walks through this remarkable exhibition, one also comes across, on the same theme, a domestic scene showing a young girl on the floor, The Broken Eggs, a sign of loss of virginity, or The Indecent Proposal, a drawing showing a lecherous old man trying to fondle a young lady. For the historian Mickaël Szanto, one of the exhibition’s curators, “Rarely will a painter have so often represented the figure of the sexual predator and the psychological destruction he inflicts on his prey.”

Droit de cuissage

It takes a good deal of lucidity and courage for an 18th-century painter to denounce the common practices of “droit de cuissage”(the supposed ‘right’ of a master to sleep with his female servants) that affect female employees of the lower classes. The artist also sometimes disguises his message, as in The Birdcatcher Tuning His Guitar, which shows a man in a rage surrounded by dead birds, symbols once again of the violent loss of virginity.

Never smiling

In fact, this exhibition is remarkable in that it forces us to observe the paintings with great precision. Our 21st-century eye might well be put off by the highly polished aesthetic of this immense gallery of children’s portraits. But on closer inspection, first of all the paintings are of great technical beauty, and above all Greuze gives his figures a strong psychological expression. He, who enjoyed great commercial success in his lifetime, developed his technique considerably, to the point of rendering faces with a porcelain-like delicacy. Yet none of them ever smiles. As if they had a premonition of the weight of the wounds that await them.

Until 25 January. www.petitpalais.paris.fr/