The Dead Bird

In 1765 Greuze showed a girl weeping over her dead canary at the Paris Salon, and the critic Denis Diderot wrote her a long, teasing address in his review, hinting that the bird stood for something else she had lost. That picture is now in Edinburgh. 35 years later Greuze came back to the subject.

This panel hung at the Salon of 1800 under a longer title that spells out the moment, a child hesitating to touch a bird for fear that it is dead. The Louvre's girl is younger, in a white dress and shawl with her left shoulder bare, and her hand has just come to rest on the white bird lying by a small dish. The grief of the earlier picture has turned into doubt.

The panel still carries the wax seal of Arthur de Rothschild, the Paris collector from the banking family, who once owned it.