Jean-Baptiste Greuze
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Jean-Baptiste Greuze (21 August 1725 – 4 March 1805) was a French painter known for such works as The Broken Pitcher. Often considered kitsch by today's standards, his paintings of domestic scenes reveal the importance of Sentimentalism in the European arts of the period (as also seen in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Richardson.)
References in literature
In the second chapter of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story The Valley of Fear, Holmes' discussion of his enemy Professor Moriarty involves a Greuze painting, intended to illustrate Moriarty's wealth despite his small income.
In the sixth part of The Leopard, a novel by the Italian writer Tomasi di Lampedusa, the Prince of Salina watches a Greuze painting, La Mort du Juste, and he starts thinking about death when his nephew Tancredi comes and asks "Are you courting death ?"
In Agatha Christie's "The Murder at the Vicarage," Miss Marple mentions her nephew considers another character "the perfect Greuze."