Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 'A Girl', about 1800

A young woman gazes dreamily out of the picture, but not directly at us. She appears to be outside in a dark woody landscape, raising the question of why she is there and what she is doing. She gathers her semi-translucent shawl about her head but does not seem to have noticed that the front of her flimsy muslin dress has fallen down, revealing her left breast. Her soft brown wavy hair is tied loosely about her head with a pink ribbon. The young lady’s large glistening eyes and voluptuous parted lips give her a sensuous appearance – she appears to be gazing in longing more than fear. Her averted eyes do not challenge the viewer’s own, allowing us freely to view her body, tantalisingly at once concealed and revealed in this dark and secluded setting.

Greuze painted many heads of young girls expressing a variety of emotions. Among these are images of girls wearing veils over their heads, such as the Bust of a Young Woman (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), in which a girl is shown wearing a light, billowing headscarf similar to the one in our painting. Another comparable head is Fright, also known as Fear of the Storm (Harvard Art Museums), which is derived from a full-length picture in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. It is possible that in our painting Greuze borrowed elements from various of his expressive heads, resulting in a kind of pastiche based on his own compositions.

Greuze creates a deliberately ambiguous image, blurring the line between youth and maturity, innocence and sensuality – a characteristic of his expressive heads that was much admired by his contemporaries. Although there has been doubt in the past about whether this is a genuine work by Greuze, the style and way in which the picture is painted suggests that it is probably a late work by the artist himself. The modelling of the girl’s face, her glistening eyes and areas of impasto on her sleeve are very much in keeping with Greuze’s individual style. The picture is painted on a mahogany panel, which also reinforces the likelihood that it is by Greuze himself as he frequently used mahogany panels for his paintings of girls’ heads. The inclusion of the tree and foliage suggests it is a late work, while the perturbed expression caused by an impending storm was a popular theme about 1800.

The painting was extremely popular when it was first put on view at the National Gallery in 1847. It was the most frequently copied picture in the Gallery in 1862, 1876 and 1880.