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Women and Children Mourning a Dead Man
Jean Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725-1805)
1778
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink, and brush and gray and brown wash, with graphite, on cream laid paper, laid down on ivory laid paper, laid down on ivory laid paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 24.9 × 32.4 cm (9 13/16 × 12 13/16 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Margaret Day Blake Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In the third quarter of the 18th century, a young generation of artists developed a sober, almost classicizing reaction to the artificial frivolities of artists like François Boucher. Greuze depicted scenes from daily life that were intended to be inspirational or morally uplifting. This drawing is a study for his painting of 1778 (now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris) showing the errant son who has returned home just as his father has died.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
