Oh I'LL get fucking started on fucking Greuze
Friends when I tell you the rabbit hole this sent me down-
Most of the notes on this one are some version of "hashtag me when I" and "just like me frfr", but I wondered: was that the artist's intent? Was she supposed to resonate so strongly with anyone who was ever Completely Fucking Done before they'd even gotten their second shoe on? What's the context here? Who the fuck is the guy who painted this?
So here's the fuck guy who painted this:
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (hilariously pronounced GROOZE) was pretty popular in his day, although he was always salty that nobody ever took him as seriously as he wanted. He lived to the then-incredible age of 80, but you'll be glad to hear he died in penniless obscurity.
At least, you will be when you learn more about him.
He was born to a poor roofer and climbed the ranks quickly in artistic circles, but even his fans described him as "a difficult and complicated man", which is generally what you call a man when they're a total piece of shit but they have talent. He wanted to be recognized as a historical painter, but the best he could land was genre painter, which he threw countless tantrums over. His marriage was described as "unsuccessful", which was usually the euphemistic term for "she left his abusive ass", but I can't find any more info than that.
He was in his 60s for the French Revolution, but at the height of his career he was one of Roccoco's big boys. If you don't know Roccoco art, yes you do:
It was ostensibly all about light, fluffy fun. Zaftig girlies frolicking with their tits out in lush pastoral gardens. They appealed to royal tastes, because they had to, because the rich were the only people who could pay for shit.
But in spite of their lightweight reputation, they weren't devoid of meaning. Look again at The Swing by Fragonard - the girl on the swing is chucking her gams way to high to be ladylike or even safe; the foppish dandy has no other ambitions in life but to get a little peekaboo under her ludicrous skirts; the servent laughing at them from the shadows is being ignored by both of the useless morons he's attending - but the composition, and by extension this whole world, would collapse without him. The garden is beautiful, but artificially cultivated - a shallow stage full of looming shadows, depicting a precarious fleeting moment of oblivious decadence.
Fragonard is Saying Something here. The brilliance of Rococo art is that it gets through the palace gates with pleasant and colorful aesthetics, then spikes the champagne with some food for thought.
And Greuze thought "that's much too clever and subtle. What if these paintings were 100% less fun."
You don't even have to understand the ancient symbolism of a broken pitcher to look at her rumpled clothes and traumatized thousand-yard stare and immediately pick up on what's clearly just happened. But it seems like Greuze's message wasn't "it's terrible that our society doesn't protect vulnerable young girls or hold those who hurt them accountable"; apparently it was "this was her fault".
Here's another crowd-pleaser, The Dead Canary:
Upon its presentation, The Académie de France was evidently quoted as saying "Holy shit dude. What the fuck. Can you just chill for a single goddamn second. Shit. Fuck."
The only thing I'll say in his defense is that he lived through a very tumultuous time in France - in his lifetime, he saw the rise of The Enlightenment and the bloody breakdown of monarchy, which was a real one-two gut punch to the once immutable pillars of How Shit Works. It probably seemed very likely that the whole world order was in danger of falling apart. So most of his work has some Improving Moral Allegory, which wasn't uncommon at the time.
Unfortunately, that moral was usually "women are stupid filthy harlots and you should never ever fuck them no matter how much they want you to. And no matter what they say, they want you to."
After I did lots and lots and lots of digging - because doing actual research is practically fucking impossible in this age of AI - I finally discovered that Lazy Italian Woman was originally called Indolence, and it was one of a total of four that Greuze painted from 1756-1757, in his early 30s, while farting around in Italy on some student visa. (So the subject might be Italian due to racist stereotypes that persist today, or just because he was in Italy. Or both!)
The set of four paintings are Broken Eggs, The Neapolitan Gesture, Indolence or The Lazy Italian Woman, and The Bird-Catcher Tuning His Guitar after the Return from a Hunt. Each one is really dense, but let's just quickly touch on each one.
Broken Eggs is, oddly enough, probably the most straightforward of the set. The matron of the house is scolding the young man (who's awkwardly trying to wrestle on his coat and hat, presumably to beat cheeks out of there) for carelessly "breaking" the housemaid's "eggs", possibly violently. She cries on the floor, clearly ruined forever, while a classic Roccoco Allegory Baby tries unsuccessfully to put the eggs back together. But he can't. Because some things can't be unbroken, you see.
The Neapolitan Gesture was probably easy to read in its time, but it's a little less clear now. From left to right, we have
Merchant/suitor with a tray of wares, who seems to have just been sent packing and does not look happy about it;
Mom, who is looking at us with the same long-suffering look moms have had forever;
Buxom lass who seems to have given him the boot, though she seems to be regretting it already;
And some more Allegory Babies staring straight at us while clinging to a dog, which usually symbolises faithfulness. I can't tell who the dog is barking at, but he's not happy either.
What the fuck is happening here? I'm honestly not sure. In its time it was probably glaringly obvious what all the symbols meant - in the same way that modern political cartoons can use a red baseball hat or an orange with a long red tie and we know exactly what they're talking about - but a lot has gotten lost in translation since then. Was he actually a wealthy guy slumming it, or was he running some kind of scam? Did he have good or bad intentions? Is the mom helping shove him off or lamenting his departure? Is the girl protecting her virtue or making a mistake that will haunt her and her Allegory Babies forever?
Third, we have Indolence, which for all its clutter is probably the simplest composition of the four. People in the notes have pointed out from her swollen feet and breasts that she's probably pregnant or just post-partum, and she's just a fucking mess. Everything is a fucking mess. In spite of her wedding ring, this woman clearly let the wrong merchant break her eggs.
And finally, in stark contrast to the other three, we have The Bird-Catcher Tuning His Guitar after the Return from a Hunt. "Bird hunting" was slang at the time that meant... well, pretty much what it still means now, and you can guess what all the dead doves on the table represent. It's the most famous of the set, and possibly the most famous he ever painted:
It's sometimes just called The Guitarist, because "cool as hell badass baller who just got done pounding down on a bunch of stupid bitches, and is preparing to gather his second wind so he can go out and seduce a bunch more stupid bitches, because he fucking rules" takes too long.
And ok, maaaaybe he's also meant to be a cautionary tale, but look at him. He's awesome. Who wouldn't want to be this guy? The Allegory Babies are conspicuous in their absence on this one, because that's not something men have to worry about. There's no regret, no consequences, no Bad Ending for this guy. All he has to worry about is getting enough sleep in between his many, many conquests.
So I guess the final question is, exactly how much did Greuze hate women? Because the baseline for his time was "quite a lot actually", but how much did he go above and beyond that? Was he just as disdainful of society's treatment of women as he was of the women themselves? How much of Indolence is sympathetic, and how much is just mockery?
After all my research, I still don't know. What do you think?
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