French School Of The Late 18th Century (after Jean-baptiste Greuze) - Portrait Of A Young Girl

French school of the 18th century or the beginning of the 19th century After Jean-Baptiste GREUZE Tournus, 1725 – Paris, 1805 Oil on mounted canvas 46 x 38 cm (63.5 x 55 cm with the frame) Our painting is undoubtedly a copy from a painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, another copy of which is in the Cognac Jay museum. The notice of the work in the museum indicates that “this portrait of a young girl is an 18th century copy of a work by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, engraved in reverse and in color by Hauer, under the title “La Petite Sœur”. The model of this engraving is surely the "Lazy Girl" which belongs to the collections of the Queen of England (London, Buckingham Palace). Greuze painted a second version of this composition, a portrait of a "Young Girl" kept at the Condé de Chantilly Museum, which has several variants. The two different interpretations of this portrait are often considered as preparatory studies for the head of the fiancée's younger sister in the "Accordée de village" (Salon of 1761, Paris, Musée du Louvre). It would seem rather that these two paintings are the isolated resumption of this figure and must be dated around 1765. " Indeed these heads of young girls with a recognizable pose are portraits of young girls of moralizing spirit where one imagines the modesty mixed with pleasure of the young person in turmoil for a reason which remains unknown but which is not too important because the painter focuses his subject entirely on the analysis of the psychology of the child at the dawn of the adolescence ! The model of this portrait could well be Georgette, the daughter of the doorman of Greuze, who served as a model for the young sister of the fiancée in his famous painting exhibited at the Salon of 1761 in Paris "L'accordée de village" (Paris, Louvre Museum). The resemblance is there, with the big eyes, the small pointed nose, the thin eyebrows, the small pink mouth and the strawberry blond hair!