Enlightenment

Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Le Fils puni

1778

Oil on canvas, 51 1/4 × 64 1/4 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris

A father's deathbed in a plain family room, given the grief and gestures of history painting.

Look at

• The figures stretch in one long band from the bed at left to the son at right, read like a sentence.
• A woman's outstretched arm crosses the gap between the bed and the figures at right, the strongest gesture in the picture.
• A dark curtain fills the upper left; the light picks out the white sheets and the father's head.

• The second episode of La Malédiction paternelle; its pendant, Le Fils ingrat, is dated 1777.
• Owned by the marquis de Véri in 1785; it entered Louis XVIII's collection with its pendant in 1820.

History painting

large pictures of myth, scripture or ancient history, placed highest by the Academy.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain