Jean-Baptiste Greuze Tournus 1725 - 1805 Paris

With Séligman & Cie, Paris;
Philip Lathrop Cable and and Martha Kelly Cable (according to a label on the reverse).

We are grateful to Edgar Munhall for confirming the attribution to Greuze and for assisting us with the cataloguing of this picture.  In a written communication dated 5 April 2006 Edgar Munhall states: "The present picture - unquestionably by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805), in my personal opinion - is a late version of the subject of the inconsolable widow that Greuze had first treated in 1763 and listed among his Salon exhibits that year under the title Le Tendre Ressouvenir (Tender Memories). In both pictures, a young widow seeks contact with the departed - in the form of a bust in the Wallace Collection painting, in the form of a funeral urn in the present work. In this case, the black veil underscores the widowed state of the distraught subject. Perhaps a decade after Le Tendre Ressouvenir, the artist depicted his wife in full mourning, also wearing a diaphanous black veil.  The present Inconsolable Widow dates from around 1785, when Greuze was frequently representing the characteristic garments of antiquity, as well as antique sculptural forms, during the contemporary vogue for neoclassicism.  In designing the band of dancing putti that ornaments the funeral urn, Greuze may have had recourse to studies of putti that he executed around 1767 for his Votive Offering to Cupid, also in the Wallace Collection."