Bold, assured and dramatic, this large and impressive red chalk study of the head of an angry man seen in profile is a preparatory drawing for Greuze’s celebrated painting of 1777, The Father’s Curse: The Ungrateful Son, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (Fig. 1).¹

This drawing is one of many surviving figure and compositional studies, in a variety of media, that relate to this important commission, and to its pendant of 1778, The Father’s Curse:  The Punished Son, also in the Louvre; both paintings are rightly hailed as masterpieces of the artist’s mature period.² Greuze’s 1777 canvas is bristling with intensity, combining powerful poses and dramatic lighting effects which give the elaborate composition a decidedly theatrical quality.

The present sheet is a study for the father, who is seated to the left of the painting, his arms outstretched in a gesture of fury, as he looks towards his son. The red chalk study, predominantly a head study, but with the indication of the father’s extended arm, captures the climax of this moment and the sense of the lurching thrust of the figure’s arms.

A drawing for the full composition, with some differences to the oil, executed in brush and black ink, heightened with white, is in the Albertina, Vienna.³ A much more detailed and finished drawing, housed in The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, is the model for the reproductive print, based on the Louvre painting.⁴ The engraver for the project was Robert Gaillard (1719-1790) who also produced the print after the 1778 pendant.

A stylistically similar drawing, also rendered in red chalk, depicting the head of the anguished son, holding his hand to his head, seen to the far right of the pendant painting, The Father’s Curse: The Punished Son, was sold at Replica Shoes ’s, London in 1993.⁵ Although drawings by Greuze are not rare, only very seldom does a figure study of this scale, quality and energy, relating to one of the artist's most important paintings, come to the market.

^1. E. Munhall, Greuze the Draftsman, exhib. cat., New York, The Frick collects ion, and Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002, p. 25, fig. 16

^2. Ibid., fig. 27

^3. Ibid., p. 226, cat. no. 81, reproduced

^4. Ibid., p. 228, cat. no. 82, reproduced

^5. Study of the Head of a distraught young man, sale, London, Replica Shoes ’s, 5 July 1993, lot 65