Jean-Baptiste Greuze

This exhibition presents a remarkable promised gift of European works on paper. Along with figurative sketches, independent studies, and portraits are two vivid landscape scenes. Artists include Boucher, Caillebotte, Degas, Fragonard, Goya, Sargent, and Vigée Le Brun.

An exhibition of two remarkable portraits of famous men lent by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia: an oil on canvas representing Benjamin Franklin painted by Jean-Baptiste Greuze in 1777, and a marble bust of Nicolas de Condorcet executed by Jean-Antoine Houdon in 1785. Also on view was a small group of letters, manuscripts, and eighteenth-century publications relating to the history of the two portraits and the relations between the American statesman and the mathematician, philosopher, and revolutionary.

A small exhibition focused on a pair of pastel portraits by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) that had recently been acquired by the museum: Baptiste Aîné and Madame Baptiste Aîné. Executed in Paris in the early 1790s, these dramatic images of a famous actor and his wife belong to an impressive series of portraits that Greuze painted and drew during the turbulent years of the French Revolution.

This exhibition was the first devoted exclusively to the drawings of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), the remarkable eighteenth-century French painter and draftsman.