Young Woman in a White Hat

The work, as is frequent of the artist and the era (as well as is generally real of tiny paintings in general) is finely wrought. The subject of this portrait appears nearly as if she had been trapped in the painting, as if she were somehow preserved under glass. The work does not have the photorealism that would characterize some works in the 20th century (perhaps due to the fact Photorealism per se could only develop after photography itself became the aesthetic norm for portraiture), but the clear intent of the artist in his painting is to offer a realistic representation of a relatively young woman dressed (or rather more undressed than dressed) in the faux-peasant kind then much in vogue in France, acquiring been popularized by the queen, Marie Antoinette. Though the sort of the portrait is essentially formal - this is a clearly a posed subject - there is also a certain intentional artlessness about the portrait, as if the young woman had just come in from some bucolic duty (or possibly arisen from her bed, given her country of dishabillee and the sheerness of her camisole).

The overall palette of the painting lies predominantly within the blue range: The hat along with its feather and the young woman's shirt are all lightly tinted blue. The scarf that she has twined around her neck is also slightly blue, although here the blue is mixed with more red to create an overall orchid. The young woman's cheek tones (as well as the skin on her shoulders and on her neck) are also blended with blue, although even more red has been mixed in so that the effect is a blue-based pink instead of overtly blue. This blue-based palette helps to produce the overall effect of a faux earthiness within the woman's beauty and - just as importantly - helps to pull the figure forward from the background so that she seems to emerge (three-dimensionally) from the picture plane.

However, although the work is pretty smooth and the thickness of paint relatively even (and pretty thin), a close examination of its surface demonstrates that Greuze's seeming artlessness is in truth only seeming. The paint is more thickly employed in some places. The highlights under the woman's appropriate eye, on the left side of her mouth, in her left pupil, on her right shoulder around the seam of her sleeve - all of these places show thicker and later applications of paint. These were almost certainly the areas of the canvas that were last touched by Greuze as he sought - owning produced the uncomplicated template for his portrait - to bring it to life, to give this rather generic young woman a sense of the particular.

The painting program is - in keeping with the predominant philosophy of portraiture and of painting in general of the late 18th century - very smooth. This smoothness is accentuated by the glazing ways utilized at the time, although it is somewhat undercut by the fine lines that have appeared in the paint as a result of the effect of time on paint and canvas. Greuze layered paint onto this canvas in a way that was meant not to draw the eye of the viewer to the program involved: He is attempting to accentuate the beauty of this young woman rather than his unique skill. Or, to rephrase this idea, he is attempting to prove his skill by doing an essentially seamless depiction of a certain type of young woman whose beauty was then very much in vogue.

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