Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
The Paternal Blessing, or The Departure of Basile
Jean Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725-1805)
c. 1769
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink, brush and black ink, gray wash and graphite, with traces of scraping, on tan laid paper, laid down on tan wove board
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 37.3 × 50.8 cm (14 11/16 × 20 in.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Mrs. Leigh B. Block
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
The second half of the 1700s was an age of great sentiment; tears flowed profusely in art and literature. Jean-Baptiste Greuze in particular capitalized on this cult of feeling. The Paternal Blessing was an illustration for a pictorial narrative by Greuze called Bazile and Thibault, or The Two Educations. It told the story of two brothers, one good and one bad. Reflecting theories of nature versus nurture espoused by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Bazile became a good man because he had been breast-fed as an infant at home, while Thibault became a bad man because he had been sent away to a wet nurse. Here, Bazile receives his father’s blessing before setting out on his own.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
