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 GREY

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GREY

He intended to paint a suite of twenty pictures, a moral romance, " Bazile et Thibaut " or " Deux educa- tions", showing the lives of good and bad. But this plan was not carried into execution. At length evil days were approaching for Greuze. His fame never recovered completely from the check it received at the Academy. Differences with his wife, which led to a painful separation, created for him a doubtful situa- tion. The preacher of the joys of family life became, in the midst of his domestic troubles, an object of derision or of pity to the populace. Younger painters, like Fragonard, surpassed him in his own style; their sentiment and form were freer than his, and their exe- cution much superior. Lastly, for some years, public taste had been changing. The wind blew in another direction. The ideas of Winckelmann were becoming iliffus'.'d. The enthusiasm for antiquity, stirred up by excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii, disgusted the pulilic with the divinities of Boucher and the bour- geoisie of Greuze. Diderot, who had lauded the latter so highly, began to abandon him. "I no longer care for Greuze", he wrote in 1769. Everything fore- shadowed the movement that was to culminate in the artistic Jacobinism of David. From the " Mort tie Socrate " (1784) of this painter, which is the manifesto of the new school, Greuze was intellectually dead. The Revolution was the finishing blow to his renown. His last works show him trying to fall in with the new ideas; they are a curious compromise between his style and that of Prudhon and the Directory. One of his last paintings was the portrait of the First Consul Bonaparte, now preserved at Versailles. Ruined by the mismanagement of his affairs and the treachery of his wife, abandoned by his clientele, deserted by the public, the old man would have fallen into the most aljject poverty but for the help he received from one of his daughters. He used to say to JVagonard; "I am seventy-five years old, I have been working for fifty, I earned three hundred thousand francs, and now I have nothing." He died at the age of eighty, in com- plete oblivion, having survived a world who.se idol he was, and whose ideal he expressed most perfectly.

Overpraised in his lifetime, and always popular (on account of his theatrical display and his moralizing literary painting), tliis artist fully merited his reputa- tion. Though his style was a false one, he was a bril- liant master of it. He represents, perhaps, the bourgeois ideal of art and morality. Of the intellec- tual movement that produced the plays of Diderot, Sedaine, and Mercier, the comic opera of Gretry and Montigny, his work is all that survives to-day. And as a painter of expressive heads, especially of children and young girls, he has left a number of specimens that display the highest artistic gifts. His "Sophie Ar- nould" (London, Wallace Gallery) and his "Portrait d'inconnue " (Van Home collection, Montreal, Can- ada) are among the most beautiful portraits of women produced by the French School.

UiDEROT, Salons, in the complete works ed. Assezat (Paris, IS — ); DE Valori, Notice en tete de VAccor lee de ViUaqe (Paris, 1901); Gretry, Memoires, II (Paris. Yen VII); Mariette, Aht'cednrio, II (Paris. 1S53); E. and J. de Goncourt, L'Art au XVIII' xiiilc, I (2nd ed., Paris, 187;!); Dilke, French Pavnters of the Etghlccnth Century (London. 1S99); Gosse, French Paint- ina from Watteau to Prudhon (London, 1903): Mauclair, J.-B. (ireuze, Sa vie, son oeuvre, son epoque (Paris, 1906).

Louis Gillet.

Grey Nuns. — The Order of Sisters of Charity of the Hopital Gf5neral of Montreal, commonly called Grey Nuns becau.se of the colour of theirattire, was founded in 1738 by the Venerable Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais (Madame d'Youville) and the Rev. Louis M. Normand du Faradon, at that time superior of the Seminary of St. Sulpice of Ville Marie (now Montreal). Madame d'Youville 's first associates were Mile. Loui.se- Thaumur Lassource, Mile. Demers, and Mile. Cusson. The four ladies rented a small house, and began by receiving four or five poor people, which

number shortly rose to ten. This beginning was made 30 Oct., 17.38. On 3 June, 1753, the little association of ladies received the royal sanction which transferred to them, under the title of "Soeurs de la Charity de I'Hopital General", the rights and privileges which had been granted by letters patent to the " Freres Ho.spitaliers" in 194. The peculiar dress of the sisterhood was adopted by mutual consent and worn for the first time on 2.5 Augu.st, 17.').t. The rule which had been given Madame d 'You ville and her companions by Father Normant in 1745 received episcopal sanc- tion in 1754, when Mgr de Pontbriant formed the little society into a religious community. This rule forms the basis of the present constitutions, which were ap- proved by Leo XIII, .30 July, 1880. Besides the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the Sisters pledge themselves to devote their lives to the service of suffering humanity. The Grey Nunnery offers a refuge to old people of both sexes, incurables, orphans, and abandoned children or foundlings. Hundreds of these waifs are received yearly into the institution.

Montreal alone possesses fifteen charitable institu- tions under the care of the Grey Nuns, viz., orphan- ages, infant schools, homes for the infirm and aged, an academy for the blind; hospitals, a night refuge and two servants' homes. Ten others are in parishes out- side of the city and eleven in the United States, namely, in Boston, Salem, Lawrence, Worcester, and Cambridge (Massachusetts), Nashua (New Hamp- shire), Toledo (Ohio), Morristown (New Jersey), and Fort Totten (North Dakota). These cities possess homes for working girls, hospitals, and orphanages. In the latter upwards of twelve hundred poor children are cared for and instructeil. Three large convents were also erected by the mother house with the rights of foimding others in turn, viz., those of St. Hyacinth, Quebec, and Ottawa, but they are distinct branches, independent of the " Hopital G^ndral" (or CSrey Nun- nery). Nicolet has branched from St. Hyacinth. In 1844 a colony of Grey Nuns left their convent in Canada to devote their lives to the relief of the Indian tribes and the education of youth in the far North- west. Their principal establishment is at St. Boni- face, and is now a vicarial house, with thirteen other missions in the archdiocese. These include hospitals, and parochial, boarding, and industrial schools. St. Boniface Hospital, conducted by the Grey Nuns, is the largest in Manitoba, affording ample accommodation for three hundred and forty patients. In the prov- ince of Alberta, Diocese of St. Albert, the Sisters have hospitals at Edmonton and Calgary, and parochial, boarding, and industrial schools at St. Albert, Dunbow Saddle Lake. Further north, in the Vicariates of Athabasca and Mackenzie, there are schools and orphanages at Fort Resolution (Great Slave Lake) and also at Providence on the banks of the Mackenzie River. This last mission was founded in 1866. These houses have each a local superior who is subject to the superiors vicar of St. Boniface or of St. Albert, who in turn owe allegiance to the superior general of the Grey Nunnery, Montreal. In the year 1906 the number of professed Grey Nuns was 1893; charitable and educational establishments committed to their care numbered 135. In the former 0960 poor inmates are provided for, and in the latter 25,964 children are instructed.

Sister M. E. Ward.

Grey Nuns of the Cross, a community founded in 1745 at Montreal by Mailame d'Youville, known as the Grey Sisters, or Grey Nuns, from the colour of the costume. Just one century later, February, 1845, at the request of Bishop Phelan, Kingston, Mother General McMullin sent four sisters to Ottawa, On- tario, then Bytown, in the Diocese of Kingston. Schools being the greatest need at Bytown, two classes were opened without delay, Sisters Elizabeth Bruyere