Broken Eggs

A basket of eggs has tipped over on the floor and broken. A young servant girl sits slumped and downcast, an older woman scolds her, and a small child at her feet, holding a bow and arrow that mark him as Cupid, tries in vain to mend one of the eggs. To a viewer in 1757, when Greuze showed this at the Paris Salon, none of that was really about breakfast. Broken things, eggs, a smashed pitcher, a dead bird, were a familiar code for a girl who had lost her virginity while her mother was out, and the Cupid makes the meaning plain. It was the first of many such pictures for Greuze, who built a career on tidy domestic scenes carrying a quiet moral sting. One critic at the Salon said the pose of the ruined girl was fit for a history painter, the highest kind of praise then going. Greuze had worked the idea up from an older Dutch composition on the same theme.