La Blanchisseuse

Greuze made his name at the Paris Salon with small scenes of ordinary life that a huge public read like short stories. This one appeared at the Salon of 1761, and the critic Diderot noticed her at once: a young laundress at her tub, glancing up from her work straight at the viewer with a look he called charming but not to be trusted an inch. She is a servant doing a menial job, wringing out linen, and yet Greuze gives her the pointed toe and knowing gaze of someone fully aware she is being watched. He has quietly stripped the washerwoman of her old link to honest hard work and slipped in a Rococo flirtation his audience came to expect from him. The painting is now at the Getty in Los Angeles.