Broken Eggs by Greuze in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2010

Broken Eggs
1756


Object Details

Artist: Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, Tournus 1725–1805 Paris)

Date: 1756

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 28 3/4 x 37 in. (73 x 94 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Bequest of William K. Vanderbilt, 1920

Accession Number: 20.155.8


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.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436579