The term “learn the business” is used advisedly. Grandon’s studio was more a manufactory of pictures than anything else, and was just as bad a school as a young artist could well have. Pictures were copied, recopied, and adapted, turned out for all the world as Jean Baptiste’s godmother turned the loaves out of her oven; and while the boy learnt the use of colours, and some drawing, he also learnt that facility which is the deadly enemy of art, artifice rather than invention, to copy rather than to create--weaknesses which beset him ever afterwards. It was natural that, when manhood was arrived at, Greuze should yield to the inevitable law that draws exceptional talent to great centres. When he was about twenty he left Lyons, and with very little capital but his abilities, his blonde beauty, and a large stock of self-satisfaction, he set out gaily to make his fortune in Paris. The story of the first ten years there is also the conventional one of early artist days, the old tale of stress and struggle, of bitter disappointments alternating with brilliant hopes and small achievements. Young Greuze was too personal and faulty in his work to please the Academy, not strong enough yet to convince any advanced movement there might be, and he divided ten trying years between a little study at the Academy and a great deal of painting the pot-boilers he had learnt to make at Lyons. At last his work attracted the attention and gained for him the friendship of two well-known artists, Sylvestre, and Pigalle, the King’s sculptor, and they were instrumental in his being able to exhibit in the Academy of 1755, when he was thirty years old, the picture which brought him his first success, “Un Père qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants.” This picture shows the living room of a raftered cottage, with the old father sitting at a table round which are gathered his six sons and daughters. One of his large, horny hands is on the open Bible before him, the other holds the spectacles he has taken off as he stops to explain the passage he has been reading. The children listen respectfully, some attentively, the others with an air of being absorbed in their own reflections, while the mother, sitting near, stops her spinning to tell the baby on the floor not to tease the dog. It is not well painted. Except that it shows a picturesque interior and expresses the sentiment of piety in the home it is intended to convey, it has but little merit, is, indeed, so mediocre that you wonder why, far from bringing fame to the young man, it should have been noticed at all. To understand its success, and the still greater success of similar pictures which followed, you must glance at the epoch of its production. CHAPTER II THE TIMES IN WHICH GREUZE LIVED