Study of a Woman’s Head
Jean-Baptiste Greuze French
Greuze’s contemporaries would have referred to this intense and affecting close-up of a model as a tête d’expression, meaning an expressive head or character study. Such works adhered to longstanding traditions about how best to depict emotions and convey the narratives of historical or biblical subjects. Although this highly finished depiction of a woman’s head has been associated with the imploring female protagonists in several of Greuze’s moralizing genre scenes, it appears to have been an independent painting. Many of Greuze’s têtes d’expression circulated successfully on the eighteenth-century art market.
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