(Sens 1672–1752 Paris)
A young girl with a bird,
oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, framed

Grimou was probably a pupil of François de Troy, who taught him to use a palette of unusually warm colours and to work with uncomplicated pictorial formats, often including half figures. His portraits frequently show idealised types and repeatedly the same sorts of young and attractive girls, rather than real contemporaries, not unlike the Dutch „Tronies“ of the 17th century. For this reason it can be said that by introducing into France the combination of northern motifs and dutch style in his improvised portraits, Grimou may be regarded as an important inventor of French Régence Art. Many of his portraits are half-lengths, and they clearly provoked the fantasy portraits later sketched by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who would later even create pastiches in Grimou’s manner (e.g. Portrait of a Girl, London, Dulwich Picture Gallery).

In terms of style as well as iconography, Grimou was influenced by Dutch 17th-century masters, notably Rembrandt van Rijn, and because of this he was often confused with his contemporaries Jean-Baptiste Santerre, Jacques Courtin and Jean Raoux, artists who also used a simple iconography and a light-hearted symbolism. The present painting also uses symbols such as the young bird just relased from his cage on the hand of a young and beautiful woman, invoking a rather frivolous connotation. Grimou appears to have not liked traditional portraits, as when he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1705, although instructed to paint as his morceaux de réception portraits of the sculptor Jean Raon and the painter Antoine Coypel, he refused and in 1709 he was expelled. As a result he joined the Académie de St Luc. This move to the more decoratively and commercially orientated St. Luc Accademy is symptomatic for his reception among contemporary critics: from a very early stage, critics firmly grounded in the cool and elegant French classicism favoured by the official art patronage system felt the need to discuss his new, warm and humoristic style of painting that was hard to praise but the success of which forced it to be noticed.