The Village Bride

When Greuze showed this at the Paris Salon of 1761, it arrived three weeks late and still became the thing everyone argued about. The philosopher Denis Diderot, who reviewed the exhibitions, wrote pages on it. What drew them was new. Not gods or kings but a peasant family caught at an ordinary, wrenching moment. A father hands over his daughter's dowry and gives her to the young man she will leave home with. The mother holds her hand, a sister weeps on her shoulder, another watches the couple with plain envy. Greuze called this kind of picture a moral painting, and this was his first. Down on the floor near the bride sits a hen with her chicks, one chick strayed from the brood, put there to echo the daughter about to leave the nest.