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Lot Essay
This sensual image is one of several erotic depictions by Greuze of languorous and diaphanously clad young women reclining distractedly on daybeds that, since the 19th century, have been know as La reveuse - ‘The Dreamer’; others include an openly carnal image of the artist’s beautiful wife, Anne-Gabrielle Babuti that is known in two painted versions (one, private collection, Paris, the other, the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg) and a red-chalk drawing (private collection, Paris). The present painting is more gently charged in its eroticism, however, and Greuze has depicted his lovely model in a more decorous state of rapture.
Another version of La reveuse, (sold Christie's, New York, 31 October 2017, lot 30, $348,000) was in the collection of the Comtesse du Barry (1743-1793), official mistress of Louis XV and one of the most voracious art collectors of the day. The picture is clearly described in each of two sales of her collections organized after the death of the king and her exile from Versailles, held to pay off her staggering debts. In his commentary on the du Barry version, Edgar Munhall observed that the composition is freely inspired by Rubens’s huge canvas depicting The Birth of Louis XIII (1622), part of the great cycle of paintings made for Marie de’ Medici; now in the Louvre, the series was still installed in the Luxembourg Palace when Greuze (and his friend Johann George Wille) made copies of it in July 1760. Greuze transformed Rubens’s tender depiction of the queen gazing with maternal affection on her infant son, the future King Louis XIII, into, as Munhall noted, a more ambiguous “mixture of voluptuousness and reflection with which Greuze excited both his contemporaries and late-nineteenth-century collectors.” (E. Munhall, 'Greuze Rediscovered', Art Gallery, XX, no. 1, October-November 1976).
At the time of the 1991 sale Anita Brookner accepted the attribution to Greuze based on an examination of a transparency, though Edgar Munhall believed the painting might have a studio hand in it.
Another version of La reveuse, (sold Christie's, New York, 31 October 2017, lot 30, $348,000) was in the collection of the Comtesse du Barry (1743-1793), official mistress of Louis XV and one of the most voracious art collectors of the day. The picture is clearly described in each of two sales of her collections organized after the death of the king and her exile from Versailles, held to pay off her staggering debts. In his commentary on the du Barry version, Edgar Munhall observed that the composition is freely inspired by Rubens’s huge canvas depicting The Birth of Louis XIII (1622), part of the great cycle of paintings made for Marie de’ Medici; now in the Louvre, the series was still installed in the Luxembourg Palace when Greuze (and his friend Johann George Wille) made copies of it in July 1760. Greuze transformed Rubens’s tender depiction of the queen gazing with maternal affection on her infant son, the future King Louis XIII, into, as Munhall noted, a more ambiguous “mixture of voluptuousness and reflection with which Greuze excited both his contemporaries and late-nineteenth-century collectors.” (E. Munhall, 'Greuze Rediscovered', Art Gallery, XX, no. 1, October-November 1976).
At the time of the 1991 sale Anita Brookner accepted the attribution to Greuze based on an examination of a transparency, though Edgar Munhall believed the painting might have a studio hand in it.