Except when he touches flesh his colour is rarely good, the scheme too grey, with undecided reds, dull violets, dirty blues, and muddy foundations. The draperies are often badly painted, a fault which he explained by saying he purposely neglected them to give more value to the painting of the flesh. Then there is his monotony. No painter ever copied himself with more constancy and indefatigability. He has but three or four types, and these he copies and recopies till you never want to see them again. The father is always the same venerable man, much too old to be the father of such young children; the mother does not vary; it is always the same child a size or two smaller or larger, as the case may be. Although he nominally gives to his girls and women a profession by labelling them washerwomen, knitters, philosophers, chesnut-sellers, kitchen wenches, and so forth, they all have the air of being members of one family, and striking likenesses at that. And one and all have the appearance of posing in light opera rather than of playing a part in life. The peasant mothers of large families have that charming coquettishness which is the hall-mark of every female he painted. The picturesque interiors are equally wanting in variety. It has been urged by Greuze’s admirers that if he had been properly trained, or had at least been spared those early years in Grandon’s picture-manufactory, had been less inclined to listen to flatteries and the advice of Diderot, who praised him for “not making his peasants coarse,” he might have overcome his faults and developed the qualities of a Chardin. The reply to this is that anything touching on genius cannot be held in check or turned from its own full expansion, that it is more than likely that Greuze expressed all he had to say, and himself summed up his own limitations when he said, “Be piquant, if you cannot be true.” To turn to the much pleasanter theme of his good qualities, Greuze was an innovator. He was the first to go to humble life for inspiration, and he brought into the painting of bourgeois subjects a distinct character till then seen only in historical scenes. He created in France the moral type of painting. On Sundays in the Louvre you still see those who do not understand the beauty of colour, line, and subtler poetry, and find utility the essential condition of all art, lingering admiringly before “La Malédiction paternelle” and “Le Fils puni”; and engravings of similar works are still cherished objects in many a home. Valuable, too, is his quality of being documentary. He admirably interpreted his age with its superficiality running into theatricalness, its affectations of a morality which worshipped languor and voluptuousness under the name of “Innocence.”