Portrait Of A Child Hugging A Dove In A Gilded Frame. Follower Of Jean-baptiste Greuze

Lovely painting of the 18th century, representing a young child dressed in the fashion of the time and hugging a dove with wings spread. Greuze has treated the theme of the girl to the bird many times throughout her career. Here, the dove symbolically refers to the purity of the child, as prescribed in the treatise "Iconologia" by Cesare Ripa, repertoire of symbols that always guides painters in the time of Greuze. Greuze also related the iconography of the girl to the bird theme of love, following the ancient tradition initiated by Ovid and Martial. Literature Jean-Baptiste Greuze, was born in Tournus in 1725 (Saône-et-Loire). He obtained his drawing skills in the studio of the painter Lyons Grandon, and went to Paris around 1750. Young provincial, unknown and shady, he did not settle in any workshop, but drew the model at the Academy. He had the chance to be noticed by "Ange Laurent de La Live Jully", a rich amateur curious new talents. Greuze had already painted his family father explaining the Bible to his children; this painting seduced "Ange L. de la Live" who exhibited it at home, boasted everywhere and quickly made its author famous. Taking as its theme this edifying scene, which contrasted so strongly with rococo hedonism, Greuze met with a new taste for the morality of sentiment; so a good part of his inventions will be doomed to illustrate the delights of virtue. The favor that greets his beloved Mother or Lady of Charity marks the advent in painting of a sentimental and predicating genre that will survive until the end of the following century, and whose "socialist realism" still produces avatars. This didactic painting owes its success to the rise of a bourgeois mentality that does not spare the noble class. Our painting dates from the 18th century, around 1760. It is characteristic of a follower of Jean-Baptiste Greuze. It is presented in a golden frame.