ABSTRACT
Two drawings on the theme of infant nursing, Le Depart en nourrice and Le Retour de nourrice, executed in the 1760s, highlight the originality of one of the foremost painters of the family in eighteenth-century France, Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s position in the campaign against wet-nursing and show that he was far more interested in the psychological consequences of this rearing practice than in hectoring women or issuing moralistic dictates. The trauma of the young child’s separation from its mother and home is a recurrent theme in his work. This pair of drawings, which were later engraved, reveals that Greuze went further in the investigation of the emotional damage entailed for both the mother and the child in the separation. The artist’s greatest originality lies in his intuition of the fundamentally sexual nature of familial bonds and of the children’s place in the family’s economy.
