Broken Eggs

Greuze painted Broken Eggs around 1756, an early genre work that established his characteristic combination of apparently innocent domestic subjects with implicit moral content. The broken eggs — scattered across the floor by some apparent domestic accident — carry the standard symbolic meaning of lost virginity or innocence that Greuze would develop more explicitly in later works. The young woman's expression and the older woman's reaction create a scene of domestic moral drama whose surface innocence barely conceals the sexual allegory beneath. The work demonstrates Greuze's early mastery of the ambiguous genre scene in which the moral message is present but requires the viewer's complicity in its decoding.

Greuze renders the domestic scene with warm, naturalistic lighting and careful attention to the textures of kitchen utensils and foodstuffs. The young woman's expression of dismay and the old woman's knowing look create a subtle narrative tension.