Anacreon in His Old Age Crowned by Love

Watermark: none visible through lining.
While the end of the eighteenth century saw the rise of neoclassicism, a parallel interest was represented in the amorous and mythological subjects such as that found in this sheet by Greuze. Love, personified by a putto, alights on the knee of the sixth-century BC Greek poet Anacreon and crowns his head with a laurel wreath, as the poet had desired in one of his Odes. Greuze's choice of subject, and indeed Anacreon's poetry, which celebrated life's pleasures, indicates the continuation of an alternate manner to the rigorous moral philosophy and severe style espoused by Jacques-Louis David and his colleagues.