This melodramatic scene of a loving, happy family espouses a number of ideas about child rearing that were in circulation in the second half of the eighteenth century. Under the influence of the writings of philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French society increasingly recognized that children should be treated as children, not miniature adults, and that childhood was an important phase of individual development. Rather than sending their infants to wet nurses, as was customary, well-to-do mothers were encouraged to breastfeed their children. Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s painting The Beloved Mother has remained in private hands since it was painted in 1769; it is thus primarily through Jean Massard’s spectacular etching and engraving, made six years later, that Greuze’s composition became well-known.