Broken Eggs

Broken Eggs

Broken Eggs
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

Broken Eggs attracted favorable comment when exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1757. One critic noted that the young serving girl had a noble pose worthy of a history painter.

The canvas was painted in Rome, but the principal source may have been a seventeenth-century Dutch work by Frans van Mieris the Elder (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), which Greuze would have known from an engraving. The broken eggs symbolize the loss of the girl's virginity.
Catalogue Entry
Greuze was of modest birth, the son of a roofer. He received his early training in Lyons and in Paris studied drawing with Charles Joseph Natoire. In 1755, after he was accepted as a candidate member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the category of genre painter, Greuze presented five works for exhibition at the Salon. He then set off as the traveling companion of the Abbé Louis Gougenot (1724–1767) for the more or less obligatory visit to Italy. They settled in Rome in January 1756, and in May, when Greuze declined to accompany Gougenot on the journey home, Natoire, by then the director of the Académie de France in Rome, offered the impoverished younger artist housing and a studio for the balance of his stay. Greuze departed for Paris before April 20, 1757, intending to show his Italian work at the biennial Salon.
Greuze was ambitious and intractable. While in Rome, he was not immune to the influence of antiquity but he seems to have been uninterested in ancient history and mythology, preferring modern subjects with moral overtones. In spring 1756 he painted Broken Eggs for Gougenot and in late February 1757 he completed the so-called Neapolitan Gesture (Worcester Art Museum) for the same patron. Both were exhibited in 1757; they are the same size and seem to constitute a narrative pair. Greuze gave the present picture a long descriptive title in the published list of works on view at the Salon: Une Mère grondant un jeune Homme pour avoir renversé un Panier d’Oeufs que sa Servante apportoit du Marché. Un Enfant tente de raccomoder un oeuf cassé. (A mother scolding a young man for having overturned a basket of eggs that her servant brought from the market. A child attempts to repair a broken egg). It is evident from the pout of the girl—as well as from the scowling child who is holding an eggshell and a dripping yoke and who provides the subtext—that something more than eggs has been broken, and in the eighteenth century it would have been understood, even if not directly stated, that it was the girl’s virtue the youth had violated.
Greuze must have been gratified when his 1757 exhibits were hung near those of the academician Chardin. The younger painter’s genre subjects would not achieve equivalent official success, however, which would be a source of grave disappointment. Greuze’s Italian subjects evade interpretation and can be read as dark and unoptimistic in mood, but Broken Eggs is nevertheless an astonishingly skillful performance, especially in view of the fact that several years before, when the artist arrived in Paris from Burgundy, he had been little more than competent.
Katharine Baetjer 2011

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