A few, indeed, of Greuze's heads can scarcely be called paintings of children at all, so many of the elements of womanhood has he mingled with what is otherwise typical of childhood. As representations of the charm and the insouciance of childhood, a painting by Greuze would ill bear comparison, for example, with a work by Chardin amongst his own compatriots, with works by Reynolds and Gainsborough; or, to come to our time, with some of the children of Millais, with Watts' _Agathoniké Hélène Ionides_, Whistler's _Miss Alexander_, Mouat Loudan's _Isa_, John Lavery's _A Girl in White_, or with Edward Arthur Walton's _The Girl in Brown_. Most of the French critics who have written of Greuze have drawn attention to this imperfection in the artist's paintings of children. De Goncourt in some passages of searching criticism has written regarding a number of these heads that they represent "the innocence of Paris and of the eighteenth century, an easy innocence which is near its fall." And De Goncourt, Diderot, and other writers have pointed out that in many the head is the head of a girl on the body of a woman; that Greuze has, in fact, put "young heads on old shoulders." {43} Charles Blanc has written of _Une Jeune Fille qui pleure la Mort de son Oiseau_, that the head is the head of a child, but the grief is the grief of a woman; and he has added to this criticism that it is rare to find in Greuze's pictures of this class the head in harmony with the body. Despite all these shortcomings, however, the pictures are charming, but the appeal of Greuze will be specially to the young, who mark the beauty only, and are unconscious of any pose or any incongruity. In addition to the kinds of paintings we have mentioned, Greuze showed that he was not quite free from the conventions of the period by painting a few mythological, religious, and allegorical works, but these are pictures which are not of any importance. "Keep yourself free from formulas," he said to Count Henry Costa, but therein he did not follow his own bidding. A writer in the _Nouvelle Biographie Générale_ has recorded that during this era it was accepted and taught that a sphere should be represented as though it had many sides. Greuze at one time accepted this absurd dogma, and in some of his pictures the chubby cheeks of children have been painted as though they had facets. His most finished works, however, are free from this blemish. Greuze's desire to be an historical painter is more evidence that he was not without the conventional ideas which have strangled art with such persistency. {44} Although Greuze sometimes sketched rapidly, yet his works are usually the result of slow and laborious effort renewed again and again. His plan was to return to his picture when he was at his best, and to paint and repaint, no matter how often, until he felt that the work was as free from faults as he could make it. {45} HIS POSITION IN FRENCH ART