"Whence comes he? Whose pupil is he?" asked the bewildered Academicians, who, in the manner of Academicians, could not believe it possible for an artist outside their circle to attain either excellence or fame. The answer came, "He is a pupil of Diderot." Although this answer did not contain the whole truth, it was yet significant of a change that was taking place in the aspirations of many French people. Diderot, a clever and copious man of letters, had commenced to write about pictures, and he was now advocating that art should be devoted to the cause of morality. Greuze's picture happening to coincide with his own idea, he at once wrote an enthusiastic, one may almost say a gushing, eulogy of this and other similar works of the artist; and in that way he helped to swell the renown which Greuze had now achieved. {6} Meanwhile, the artist, with that perversity which one has noted in the early life of other famous men, must now leave his own path to go to study art in Italy. Hundreds of years have been needed to convince painters that the Italian artists wrought great pictures because they expressed their own ideas of beauty, just as away from Italy Rembrandt "saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks." "I do not study the ancients," wrote Chantrey, heedless of syntax, "but I study where the ancients studied--nature." The ambition of Greuze at this time was to belong to that singularly dreary and barren class of painters known as historical painters; and he wasted some years in the pursuit of a project which, in the end, brought him one of the most crushing humiliations of his whole life. "Woe to the artist," Goethe has written, "who leaves his hut to squander himself in academic halls of state!" and this woe fell upon Greuze in exceeding bitterness when his first historical picture was exhibited. But that incident belongs to the year 1769, and it was at the end of the year 1755, when he was thirty years of age, that he went to Italy. Almost the only effect of his stay of two years in Italy was that for some time the figures in his pictures were arrayed in the "resplendent small clothes" of the people of that country, and had also Italian names. The {7} painter who did really influence Greuze was Rubens, who was not an Italian, and whose pictures, no further away than the Luxembourg in Paris, it was in later years one of the great delights of his life to study. In the list of Greuze's works for the year 1757 we notice amongst some pictures of the _genre_ type--the representation, that is, of the life of the humble--a number of paintings which have Italian names; and then there are portraits, and the first of that long series of heads of girls and boys whose fame has outlasted the fame of all his more pretentious works.