Jean-Baptiste Greuze

Jean-Baptiste Greuze's paintings give family relationships and human feeling a central role in domestic narrative. Expressive faces, hands, and carefully arranged incidents encourage attention to what has happened and how the figures respond. Works such as Broken Eggs connect familiar settings with implications that extend beyond their immediate surface. His portraits use related attention to expression on a more concentrated scale, linking individual likeness with the emotional language of eighteenth-century French painting.