The Punished Son

Greuze had worked out this scene 13 years before he painted it. At the Salon of 1765 he showed two drawings, one of a son leaving home under his father's curse, the other of his return, and the critic Denis Diderot praised them at length. Only in 1777 and 1778 did they become the two large canvases now in the Louvre. This is the second. The young man has come home too late and finds his father dead in bed. He stands on the right, a hand pressed to his face, while his mother, in a dark shawl, turns to show him the body. A crutch lies on the floor beside him, and a boy kneels at the bedside with his face in his hands. By 1785 both pictures belonged to a collector, the marquis de Véri, and the museum bought the pair in 1820.