Broken Eggs

In an interior a young woman stands with bowed head, looking ashamed, a basket of broken eggs at her feet. An old woman confronts a flustered young man, while a small boy toys with the broken shells. Jean-Baptiste Greuze was an eighteenth-century French painter celebrated for moralizing genre scenes, conveying ethical lessons through dramatic moments of family life; the Enlightenment critic Diderot was among his champions. Broken eggs were a contemporary metaphor for lost virginity, implying that the young woman has just been seduced. Greuze tells a suggestive moral tale through an everyday scene, his figures as expressive as actors on a stage. The picture was painted in Rome in 1756 and shown at the Paris Salon the following year.