The Broken Pitcher

By 1891, when Bouguereau finished this, the Impressionists had been showing their loose, bright canvases in Paris for nearly two decades, and the smooth academic manner he practised was starting to look old-fashioned. He kept at it anyway, and kept selling. A barefoot girl sits by a stone well, a cracked pitcher on the ground beside her. To a 19th-century audience the broken vessel had one clear meaning, the loss of virginity, an old symbol Bouguereau borrowed from painters like Greuze a century before. Her downcast, wounded look leaves little doubt about the subject. He turned out many such single-figure country girls, quietly suggestive under their air of innocence, and collectors on both sides of the Atlantic could not get enough of them.