The broken pitcher

Greuze painted The Broken Pitcher around 1771, one of his most celebrated female head studies depicting a young woman carrying a broken pitcher — a standard emblem of lost virginity in the iconographic vocabulary of the period. The broken vessel that can no longer hold water was a transparent symbol of female sexual experience, but Greuze's treatment is characteristically ambiguous: the young woman's expression is neither guilty nor defiant but simply present, her beauty undiminished by whatever the broken pitcher implies. The work was enormously popular through engravings and became one of the most reproduced images of female youth in eighteenth-century France.

Greuze renders the girl's luminous complexion and disheveled clothing with characteristic precision and sensuality. The soft modeling and warm palette create an atmosphere of tender vulnerability that serves both the sentimental and allegorical dimensions of the subject.