The French painter Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) was most famous for his sentimental genre scenes of peasant life.

Jean Baptiste Greuze was born at Tournus on Aug. 21, 1725. His early life is obscure, but he studied painting in Lyons and appeared in Paris about 1750. He entered the Royal Academy as a student and worked with Charles Joseph Natoire, a prominent decorative painter. During the 1760s Greuze achieved a significant reputation with his sentimental paintings of peasants or lower-class people seen in humble surroundings and in the midst of theatrically emotional family situations; examples are The Village Bride (1761), The Father's Curse (1765), and The Prodigal Son (1765).

In 1769 Greuze was admitted to the academy as a genre painter. Ambitious to become a member of the academy as a history painter, which was a higher rank, he was so angered by his admission as only a genre painter that he refused to show...