The Petit Palais in Paris will present a groundbreaking exhibition dedicated to Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), celebrating the 300th anniversary of the forgotten French master's birth. Running from September 16, 2025, to January 25, 2026, "Greuze: Spotlight on Childhood" will bring together exceptional works from French, English, Dutch, and American museums to honor an artist who was celebrated in his time by the greatest collectors, critics, and thinkers including Diderot, but has since fallen into obscurity.
This audacious artist, who opposed academic conventions, dedicated his creativity to a revolutionary social subject: the child. Through exceptional loans, the Petit Palais can pay tribute to Greuze, a painter renowned for his portraits and genre scenes. Paintings from the collections of the Louvre, the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Royal Collection of England will populate the walls of the Parisian institution to highlight, through the lens of childhood, this "rebellious spirit" who never ceased "to reaffirm his creative freedom and the possibility of rethinking painting outside conventions."
The exhibition, like Greuze's work, makes childhood its central theme. With paintings distributed across seven sections, visitors will be able to observe how children evolved in 18th-century French society, from early childhood to the dawn of adulthood, presented through intimate scenography designed as a succession of small 18th-century salons. Visitors may be charmed by the gentle gaze in "La Petite Nanette" (undated) or feel compassion for the young girl who has broken the eggs in "The Broken Eggs" (1756). Whether working on wood, canvas, or paper, Greuze always managed to convey emotion, movement, and thought.
Thanks to "sharp-eyed" wall texts scattered throughout the exhibition, visitors will be able to search the paintings for details that give the works deeper dimension or hidden meaning. Among the featured works is "Child Playing with a Dog (portrait of Louise-Gabrielle Greuze)" from 1767, an oil on canvas measuring 63 x 53 cm from a private collection, which exemplifies the artist's tender approach to depicting children.
Greuze is probably the artist who most frequently represented children in his work. Whether naughty, lazy, worried, loving, innocent, or mischievous, the children in Greuze's paintings appear in all sorts of facets. Through the figure of the child, an entire sociology of the family emerges under the painter's brush, which the exhibition aims to highlight. He shows family rituals, for example in "The Twelfth Night Cake" (1774), domestic dramas, and the complex relationships that animate this mini-society that is the family.
Children are tossed about by paradoxical movements characteristic of the family universe: love and violence, serenity and anxiety, compassion and jealousy. Resilient, they nonetheless manage to grow and flourish. Greuze's paintings seem to carry the ambition of denouncing tense family climates while celebrating peaceful homes. "The Twelfth Night Cake," an oil on canvas measuring 73 x 92 x 2.5 cm from the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, perfectly illustrates these family dynamics.
The exhibition will also examine the historical context in which Greuze composed his paintings. The 18th century was marked by the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that updated ancient texts and reinterpreted them. Thus, thinkers like Diderot, Rousseau, and Condorcet questioned the vision of the child considered as an unfinished being who would only have value once he became an adult. Greuze also opposed this Aristotelian conception. On the contrary, he wanted to place the child face to face with the tragedy of death, the beauty of love, and the cruelty of the world.
"The Broken Eggs" from 1756, an oil on canvas measuring 73 x 94 cm from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, demonstrates this philosophy. Greuze's work becomes almost a manifesto. He seems to dream of a return to childhood: "There is in Greuze the desire to return to the bosom of childhood, a time of purity and candor," affirms Annick Lemoine, director of the Petit Palais and curator of the exhibition.
Like the "Young Shepherd Who Tries His Luck to Know if He is Loved by His Shepherdess" (1760-1761), depicted blowing a dandelion, Greuze seems to make a wish for tranquility and freedom for the children of contemporary society. This oil on canvas measuring 72.5 x 59.5 cm, housed in the Petit Palais collection, embodies this message that the exhibition wants to resonate with our current world.
The exhibition represents a rare opportunity to rediscover an artist who revolutionized the representation of childhood in French painting. Through his innovative approach to depicting children not as miniature adults but as complex beings with their own emotional lives, Greuze anticipated modern psychological understanding of child development. His work challenged the artistic establishment of his time and paved the way for new forms of emotional expression in painting.
Visitors to "Greuze: Spotlight on Childhood" at the Petit Palais, located at Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris, will discover not only beautiful paintings but also a profound meditation on childhood, family, and society that remains remarkably relevant today. The exhibition runs from September 16, 2025, to January 25, 2026, offering an unprecedented opportunity to encounter the forgotten genius of Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
