Broken Eggs

When it was painted

Paris, 1755. Greuze, about thirty years old, suddenly had people talking. His painting of a father reading the Bible to his children was a hit at the Salon, and the Royal Academy accepted him as a provisional member. Not bad for a young man from Tournus, a small town in Burgundy, who had learned his trade in Lyon.

That same autumn he packed up and left for Italy, traveling with the Abbé Gougenot, an art lover. In those days French painters were expected to go to Rome and study the old masters. Yet what Greuze painted in Rome was not a myth or a saint. It was this little kitchen drama in a country house.

The picture went on show at the Paris Salon in 1757. Scenes like it, ordinary family moments staged like a play with a moral lesson, made Greuze even more popular. Viewers of his time read broken eggs as a sign that a young woman had lost her innocence. One tipped basket did the work of a whole paragraph.

A few years later the writer Denis Diderot praised Greuze again and again in his reviews of the Salon. But Greuze wanted to be ranked as a history painter, the kind of painter the Academy prized above all others. In 1769 he submitted a scene from Roman imperial history, and the Academy admitted him only as a painter of genre scenes. Stung, he stayed away from the Salon for many years.

The painting came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1920. Look again at the little boy at the lower right. While the grown-ups argue, he clutches what looks like a broken egg and glances out at us. In all that noise, he is the only one who meets our eyes.