Tête de jeune femme

A young woman’s head and shoulders rise from a dark ground in a study of expression rather than a portrait of a particular sitter — the type of head on which Greuze’s contemporaries lavished their praise for his gift of making feeling legible on a face. Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the most celebrated painter of sentiment in eighteenth-century France, produced such heads throughout his career, and this Cognacq-Jay example, painted about 1775, shows the melting brushwork and luminous flesh tones of his late manner. The painting is held in the Musée Cognacq-Jay, le goût du XVIIIe.