Jean-Baptiste Greuze (Tournus 1725-1805 Paris)

Probably preparatory for the hands of the supplicating mother in Greuze's painting The Drunken Cobbler, datable to the early 1780s (Portland, Art Museum). Another study of hands in the Yale University Art Gallery has been linked by Edgar Munhall to the same composition; he identified them as studies for the hands of the father (E. Munhall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze: 1725-1805, exhib. cat., Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 1976, p. 187, no. 93). The sheets exemplify Greuze's consistent concern to properly represent the emotions of his figures through their gestures, a preoccupation which has resulted in a particularly high proportion of studies of hands and feet among his surviving drawings.