Women and Children Mourning a Dead Man
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink, and brush and gray and brown wash, with graphite, on cream laid paper, laid down on ivory laid paper, laid down on ivory laid paper
- Dimensions
- 24.9 × 32.4 cm (9 13/16 × 12 13/16 in.)
- Genre
- Ink or chalk wash
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago
Tags
drawings (visual works)graphiteinkwashink or chalk washprints and drawingpaper (fiber product)
About
In the third quarter of the 18th century, a young generation of artists developed a sober, almost classicizing reaction to the artificial frivolities of artists like François Boucher. Greuze depicted scenes from daily life that were intended to be inspirational or morally uplifting. This drawing is a study for his painting of 1778 (now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris) showing the errant son who has returned home just as his father has died.
