The figures in Greuze's _genre_ pictures pose before the spectators; they gesticulate and overdo their parts like barn-stormers. Pity becomes maudlin, morality degenerates into sanctimoniousness, and humility is degraded into utter abasement. The sentimentality in _Un Paralytique Soigné par sa Famille_, _ou le Fruit de la Bonne Education_, and in _La Mère Paralytique_ is particularly nauseating, and in _La Mère bien Aimée_ the exaggeration of what is in actual life a very tender sentiment makes of that picture a very significant example of Greuze's stilted manner. The six children--all of them about the same age--who have flung themselves upon their mother, seem so numerous, {36} and are so involved in a confused heap of humanity that Madame Geoffrin spoke of the picture as a "fricassee of children," and incurred thereby the fulminations of the artist. In his _genre_ pictures, too, as is usual in melodrama elsewhere, the humble cottage is the headquarters of all the virtues. Greuze, it is true, made sketches for his pictures in the streets and in the market-places; but there is none of the freshness of the sketch when the figure appears on the canvas, and De Goncourt has complained that little tatterdemalions with their split breeches have become on their way to Greuze's canvases the Cupids of Boucher dressed as Savoyards; and further, he has put in a mild demurrer that the artist's washerwomen do not wash! In strong contrast to Greuze's melodramatic, affected, domestic scenes are those by Chardin, another French artist of the eighteenth century. No ethical teaching is obtruded in his pictures; there is no pose, and the spectator can enjoy the real poetry of life, the sweetness and simplicity of well-ordered homes, undisturbed by the poseurs who clamour for our regard in many of the pictures by Greuze. [Illustration: THE PRETTY LAUNDRESS. (La Belle Blanchisseuse.)] Another fault of Greuze's _genre_ pictures is their poverty and feebleness of colour. There is a general deadness, and in parts an abuse of purple and violet. Some of the tints have a dirty muddled look, and the shadows are heavy and brown. Still the chief fault is that art in {37} these pictures is relegated to a second place; the pictures are a means, and not an end. To see many of his _genre_ pictures together is to receive an impression of monotony. It is clear that the range of the artist is narrow, that he is making a few ideas cover a great area of canvas, and that he ceased to grow intellectually at an early stage of his career.