La Malédiction paternelle - Le Fils ingrat

By the 1770s French taste was tiring of Rococo charm, and Greuze had built a following painting ordinary family life as if it were high drama. Here a son has taken money from an army recruiter, who waits in the doorway, and is walking out on his household. His father, half-risen from a chair, throws a curse after him while the mother and children cling and plead. Greuze meant it to be read like a stage tableau, a lesson in duty gone wrong. He painted a companion scene of the same young man coming home too late, to find his father dead. The two hung as a pair, a short moral story told across two canvases.