Cimon and Pero: “Roman Charity”

When the aged Cimon was forced to starve in prison before his execution, his devoted daughter Pero secretly visited her father to nourish him at her own breast. In his Memorable Acts and Sayings of the Ancient Romans, Valerius Maximus presented Pero’s selfless devotion as the highest example of honouring one’s parent. Closely basing the setting and arrangement of figures on Peter Paul Rubens’s version of the subject, Jean-Baptiste Greuze probably made this oil sketch as the final stage of preparation for an unexecuted, large-scale painting; contemporaries admired the rapid execution, vibrant colours and lively paint handling, and the critic Denis Diderot lavishly praised the artist’s combination of genre and history painting and his public, moralizing purpose. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.