In this artwork, how is the Background discussed?
French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a late-eighteenth-century genre painter who was influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists. He first exhibited at the Salon of 1755, receiving great attention for his genre painting Un Père de famille qui lit la Bible à ses enfàns (Father Reading the Bible to His Children).  Several years previously, Denis Diderot began publishing the first modern form of art criticism, and became one of Greuze's admirers after they met in 1759. Greuze achieved even greater success at the Salon of 1761 with L'Accordée de village. Greuze was considered one of the greatest painters of his time, but his popularity began to decline by the 1780s. After the French Revolution he lost everything and died penniless. Greuze was virtually forgotten by the art world for several centuries until his reemergence in the late twentieth century with the reappraisal of art from the Ancien Régime.
Denis Diderot genre painting genre painter Salon Jean-Baptiste Greuze Ancien Régime French Revolution L'Accordée de village