viewer’s sympathetic engagement with the concerns of figures represented in art, “sentiments” could turn
art into a school of morals:
Every piece of sculpture or painting must express a great maxim, a lesson for the spectator; otherwise
it is mute.
(from Diverse Thoughts on Painting or Pensées détachées sur la peinture, 1772 in Diderot, 1968, 765; my translation)Artists devised a range of strategies in order to engage the viewer imaginatively in morally significant
scenes. These ranged from a deployment of the explicitly coded expressive stereotypes of Le Brun, to
representing more “absorptive” or meditative expressions that of emotion engaged the viewer while
seeming implicitly to indicate less awareness of the viewer’s presence (Walsh, 1996, 523–524).
Moral looking was inflected by the viewer’s position in the social order in relation to those of the figures
and situations represented in a work of art. This was particularly the case with genre paintings relating to
contemporary life. Greuze’s genre paintings were popular from the mid1750s to the early 1780s. Emma
Barker has argued that the artist’s carefully composed, emotive scenes treated themes of genuine
relevance to his contemporaries and in a way that they found aesthetically desirable (Barker, 2005, 3–9).
His genre paintings often drew on fashionable contemporary literary themes such as those explored in the
novels of Samuel Richardson, including his Clarissa: or the History of a Young Lady (1748), in which
virtuous (and less socially secure) heroines fell victim to deceiving rakes of ‘superior’ social status
enabled by a seemingly complicit society. Other influences included tearful comedies written by Pierre
Claude Nivelle de la Chaussée (1692–1754); and Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Héloïse (Julie, ou la
nouvelle Héloïse, 1761), in which the highly sensitive (sensible) heroine Julie both sheds and provokes
tears as she wrestles with a conflict between personal inclination and social duty, in matters of the heart.
The tears shed over such subjects, whether provoked by Richardson’s novels or Greuze’s paintings,
helped to create a community of feeling that spread from private and subjective to publicly shared
responses (Barker, 2005, 52–54). Sarah Maza has argued that the high valuation of family sentiment
crossed class boundaries (Maza, 1997). The social values (e.g. meritocracy) that developed as a
consequence of such shared concerns began to challenge those of an older aristocratic order. The realms
of the family and of civil society represented in genre paintings, relatively private by comparison with
those of the church and state, educated the bourgeoisie in the values they might now embrace as a new,
economically active public (Barker, 2005, 15). Greuze’s The Village Bride (L’Accordée de village,
1761) (Figure 5.8), in which a young girl’s dowry is presented by her father, and in the presence of her
family, to her prospective bridegroom, could be read as a representation of a rural family generating the
“good wealth” arising from productive cultivation of the land that was so valued by the Physiocrats
(Barker, 2005, 46–64). Additionally, the (male) viewer might “enter” the painting by proxy, perhaps
identifying with the girl’s fiancé and being “seduced” into protecting her virtue through the arousal of his
own desire (Barker, 2005, 52–54).