Jean-Baptiste Greuze, French, 1725 – 1805

The Laundress, c. 1761
Oil on canvas
Framed: 62.23 x 52.07 cm (24 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches)
Harvard Art Museum, Gift of Charles E. Dunlap
1957.181

On Greuze's Depiction of Women
Groupings, accessories, poses, attitudes, costumes, everything in the art of Greuze conspires to produce this sensual irritation. The poses are facile, abandoned; the necks project, invitingly from the nestling bodies. The dress, the whole attire reinforces the effect by adding to the voluptuous softness of its texture the amorous appeal of its colour. Between Woman, as represented by Greuze, and Desire, there subsists no longer that barrier—the rigid bodice, the sober fichu, the stiff, solid, almost conventual dress—which protects the housewives of Chardin; everything floats and flutters, all is cloud-like, capricious, freely flowing about the limbs; the linen seems to frolic with the very charms it is assumed to hide . . . and it is no longer the rough household linen, newly washed from the farm laundry and faintly buff in colour: it is the linen of amorous undress prompt to fall into folds and creases, the linen of the kind of cap that easily drops off, of those lappets which tremble against the tips of blushing ears, the linen of gauze fichus which reveal the pink of the skin and palpitate in time with the beating heart, veils designed to be undone with a breath! . . . The peculiar subtlety of this art is in its transformation of the simplicity and heedlessness of a young girl into something sensually inviting. It bestows a mischievous coquetry, a thousand tantalizing creases upon the most virginal attire and yet contrives that it should be still suggestive of chastity.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, French XVIII Century Painters: Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, La Tour, Greuze, Fragonard, trans. Robin Ironside (London: Phaidon, 1948), 248. Originally published in the Goncourts' L'Art au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1856-75), 1:289-360.