Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 'A Girl with a Lamb', before 1775

A young girl holding a lamb tilts her head up and back to gaze at us. She has light green eyes, rosy cheeks and lightly parted lips. Her auburn hair is loosely pulled back by a light pinkish ribbon. She wears a loose-fitting white chemise that has slipped off her shoulder, leaving it bare. In her arms she tenderly holds a lamb, which is decorated with a blue ribbon. The girl and lamb occupy the immediate foreground, making them appear close to us and giving the picture a feeling of intimacy. The background is an undistracting plain buff brown, as in many of Greuze’s similar works. The picture is unfinished and covered in a patchy worn varnish which has discoloured, affecting its appearance.

Although the lamb is associated with Christ in religious art, it is likely that here it symbolises innocence, patience, gentleness and humility. However, Greuze’s painting sends mixed messages as although these qualities are suggested by the girl’s youth and seemingly innocent gaze, her bare shoulder and provocatively parted lips suggest a more knowing interaction with us.

Greuze painted young women with pets with sentimental or moralistic overtones into the 1780s and 1790s. Greuze’s pictures of young women cuddling pets, implying their ability to feel emotion, relate to the eighteenth-century cult of ’sensibility' fostered by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others. The fusion and confusion between youth and maturity, innocence and corruption were also explored in contemporary novels such as Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, published in 1782.

Greuze’s single-figure genre paintings were highly sought-after and made good money for him. He painted at least four compositions of girls holding lambs, suggesting that the theme was particularly popular. The best known of these is his Innocence, which is an oval format picture with the girl and lamb facing frontally – the finest version of this composition is in the Wallace Collection in London. He also painted a girl resting a lamb on a marble pedestal (private collection). The girl’s features are more individualised in that painting, suggesting that it might be a portrait. There is also a slightly larger-scale painting by Greuze known as L’Agneau Chéri (‘The Darling Lamb’), sold at Christie’s Paris in 2010, in which the figures are depicted full length. There is a slightly reduced copy of our painting after Greuze in the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth.