Broken Eggs

Jean-Baptiste Greuze French

Not on view

In moralizing genre subjects such as this, Greuze brilliantly formulated a solution to the impasse that arcane history subjects posed to artists and the public. At the Salon of 1757, a critic even declared that the pose of this young servant girl, whose loss of virginity is symbolized by the broken eggs, was worthy of a history painter. Greuze struck upon such subjects, based in part on seventeenth-century Dutch painting (the girl’s pose actually derives from Frans van Mieris the Elder), while still a student in Rome, though he would spend the next decades stubbornly in pursuit of the official title of history painter.

Broken Eggs, Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, Tournus 1725–1805 Paris), Oil on canvas

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