Famous paintings of crying and grief run from Giotto's Lamentation, around 1305, to Bouguereau's The First Mourning of 1888. All twelve answer one problem: grief happens inside a person, and a canvas can only show the outside.
The stories behind them can be as strange as the pictures. A critic refused to believe a girl was crying over a dead bird, and a healthy child was asked to pose as a dying one.
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How I Chose These Twelve
A crying painting, on this page, is a picture whose real subject is grief. Someone has died, is about to die, or has done something that cannot be undone, and the people left behind have to carry it.
The obvious way to show that grief is to paint a tear, and it is also the weakest. A tear is a tiny mark, lost from the back of a church or across a crowded exhibition hall. A bowed neck or a hand over the eyes reads from across the room.
So every picture here earns its place because the sorrow shows in a whole body. Several painters went further and hid the face of the person who suffers most.
12. A Girl Weeping over her Dead Bird, Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1765)
The girl's head has dropped so heavily into her left hand that her fingers bend back against her temple. Her eyelids are red and shut, and on the edge of the cage beside her lies a dead canary, its head hanging over the side. Jean-Baptiste Greuze finished this oval canvas in Paris in 1765.
That year he showed it at the Salon, the great public exhibition held in the Louvre by the French Royal Academy, the body that trained and ranked the king's painters. The Salon was where Greuze found his audience.
He specialized in domestic scenes built to make strangers cry, the way a sad play does. Here the bird does that work, and for viewers in 1765 it meant more than a lost pet. In French pictures of the time, a caged bird could stand for a girl's innocence, and a dead one for the end of it.
The philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot, who reviewed that Salon, pushed this reading further than anyone. He gave the picture several pages and spoke to the girl directly, as if she could hear him: "Such pain! At her age! And for a bird!"
He refused to believe the canary was the real cause of her tears. In his reading, a young man had given her the bird and then gone away. Lost in thoughts of him, she forgot to give it water and seed, and it died.
At a Glance
Artist: Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725 to 1805)
Painted: Completed by 1765, Paris
Medium: Oil on canvas, oval
Size: 53.3 × 46 cm (21 × 18 in)
Where to see it: Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
11. The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca, Ary Scheffer (1835)
Chalk white against a sky that is nearly black, two bodies drift sideways through the air, wrapped in each other's arms and unable to stand. Ary Scheffer painted them in 1835. They are Paolo and Francesca, two lovers from the Inferno, the poem in which the Italian poet Dante imagines a journey through hell.
At the right edge, two men watch the couple from the dark. One of them is Dante himself, who placed the lovers in hell, and in his poem this meeting is more than he can bear.