This bold and vibrant red chalk study of a young woman gazing upwards with her mouth slightly open is related to the young girl crowned by Cupid in Greuze’s 1767 painting, A young woman praying at the Altar of Love, now in the Wallace Collection, London (fig. 1).¹

The painting was exhibited at the Salon of 1769, when Greuze, eager to be recognised as a History painter, submitted several classical subjects for review. The artist’s meticulous research for the subject saw him taking inspiration from Pierre Jean Mariette's Traité des Pierres graveés (1750), where the cupid is featured in one of Bouchardon’s prints. Though somewhat negatively received at the Salon, the painting was subsequently bought by the Duc de Choiseul (1719-1785), by whom it was hung, alongside another of Greuze’s canvases, in his peacock blue bedroom.

Another red chalk study relating to the head of the young woman in the painting was on the art market in New York in 1997.² That drawing is more freely executed with very little shading around the head and has been described as the preparatory study for the painting. The present drawing, which is more finished, with heavier shading in the background, is closest to the painted version, stylistically placing it among the artist’s series of têtes d’expression.  Greuze sometimes based his drawings of expressive heads on figures in paintings that he was working on at the time, so the present sheet was probably executed circa 1767. These dynamic studies were extremely popular with contemporary collectors, with many immortalized through prints and engravings.

This appealing and very well preserved head study was once owned by Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon (1747-1825), the polymath painter, draughtsman, etcher, curator and author, who was appointed as the first director of the Louvre in 1803. The relationship between Greuze and Vivant Denon was, as Yuriko Jackall has described, a close one³: the two artists executed portraits of each other and Vivant Denon produced a number of engravings after Greuze's original designs. An amusing yet sympathetic drawing of Greuze, by Vivant Denon, depicts the artist, full length, turning around to look at one of his têtes d’expression.⁴  

Another drawing for the River God depicted in the painting on the frieze below the statue of Cupid is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York,⁵ and one for the full figure of the young woman, now in a London private collection, was sold in Paris in 1965.⁶

1. A. Brookner, Greuze: The rise and fall of an eighteenth-century phenomenon, London 1972, no. 47, reproduced fig. 47

2. Sale, New York, Christie's, 30 January 1997, lot 198

3. Yuriko Jackall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze et ses têtes d'expression. La fortune d'un genre, Paris 2022, pp.17–48.

4. Edgar Munhall, Greuze the Draftsman. exhib. cat., The Frick Collection, New York, and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2002, p. 24, fig. 15

5. Ibid., pp. 180-181, cat. no. 62, reproduced

6. Sale, Paris, Palais Galliera, 27 March 1965, lot 4