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Your galleryWomen and Children Mourning a Dead Man
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Follow the woman’s outflung arm at the head of the bed, then find the figure kneeling at the front with his face hidden.
This pen and wash study prepares Greuze’s painting of 1778, now in the Louvre, of a wayward son who returns to find his father newly dead. Women and children cry out and hide their faces around the body on the bed. An inscription says Greuze gave the sheet in 1799 to a Le Brun, possibly the dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, husband of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, whose portraits hang in this room.
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 · 24.9 × 32.4 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Neoclassicism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Women and Children Mourning a Dead Man
- Artist
- Jean-Baptiste Greuze French, 1725-1805
- Date
- 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
- Dimensions
- 24.9 × 32.4 cm (9 13/16 × 12 13/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Margaret Day Blake Fund
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.