“The Angry Wife”: The Fantasy of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Infamous Marriage

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, famed genre painter of the late eighteenth century, made his reputation painting family scenes. His own family life was far from exemplary: infidelity, angry arguments, separation, and ultimately divorce during the French Revolution. Using the painting, “The Angry Wife” and his mémoire against his wife, Greuze managed to influence critical opinion that he was the miserable innocent dealing with a violent, conniving wife and unfit mother to their daughters. In this paper I examine the construction of this fantasy and its perpetuation over time. When Jean-Baptiste Greuze and his wife, Anne-Gabrielle Babuti, separated in 1786, he painted “The Angry Wife.” Domestic harmony is gone. The wife is a fury, with disheveled hair, her clothes disordered, her eyes those of a madwoman. An armchair is overturned and she is brandishing a bottle, threatening her husband, and frightening the two daughters who cling to him. In 1791 Greuze dictated his Mémoire contre sa femme, spelling out the innumerable horrors of his marriage, from deception and manipulation to infidelity, embezzlement, and murderous acts. I would argue that Greuze was deliberately defaming his wife, building a fantasy that made him the aggrieved party in an on-going war between two strong-willed people. Finally, in 1793 his wife divorced him, using the liberal divorce law available only during the French Revolution, on terms of incompatibility of humor and character. Until recent times, Greuze's fantasy ruled. Diderot seconded Greuze's characterization of Anne-Gabrielle Babuti as “dangerous.” The Goncourt brothers, Louis Hautecoeur, Edgar Munhall, and numerous other art historians repeated this assessment. Only when Françoise Arquie-Bruley published documents related to Greuze in 1983 did the fantasy begin to unravel. With the advent of a more carefully nuanced gender/cultural history it is possible to deconstruct the fantasy of the “angry wife.”