Lot 40
Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Tournus 1725 - 1805 Paris
Head of a young girl
Red chalk
406 by 325 mm; 16 by 12⅞ in.
Condition Report
Provenance
Private collection, France;
private collection, Vermont, by 1999;
with W.M. Brady & Co., Inc., New York, Master Drawings 1530-1920, 2012, no. 22,
where acquired by the present owner
Catalogue note
The present work, executed in a robust yet delicate combination of red chalk, is a highly refined and well-preserved example of one of Greuze’s superb, expressive studies of heads, known as têtes d'expression, which he produced from the 1760s on. As noted by Edgar Munhall these drawings owed a certain debt to the academic exercises advanced by Charles Lebrun in the seventeenth century and therefore play an exciting and important role in the evolution of French history painting.1 It is, however, their modern sensibility which truly distinguishes these drawings from the work of Lebrun and his followers, providing the viewer with a sense of the sitters' being truly drawn from life and therefore less formulaic in their depiction.
As is so frequently the case with these têtes d'expression, this drawing is not a preparatory study for any known painting by Greuze, but is rather a fine example of the emotive, bust-length studies that the artist executed with nothing more than sharpened red chalk. Greuze’s control of the medium is exquisitely demonstrated in his variety of hatching and cross-hatching throughout the drawing, coupled with areas of shadow, skillfully created by rubbing his chalk against the grain of the paper.
Though many of these drawings were intended to be reproduced as engravings, a print after this design does not appear to survive. However, a highly comparable red chalk drawing, subsequently engraved by Pierre-Charles Ingouf, of another young model gazing into space and reflecting on a similarly fleeting emotion, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.2
1. See E. Munhall, Greuze the Draftsman, exh. cat., New York, The Frick Collection, 2002, p.158
2. Ibid., pp. 158-159, no. 52, reproduced