Broken Eggs
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
28 3/4 x 37 in. (73 x 94 cm)
Classification
Paintings
Department
European Paintings
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Bequest of William K. Vanderbilt, 1920
Accession Number
20.155.8
Tags
Art Historical Context
Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s “Broken Eggs,” completed in 1756, presents a lively domestic interior populated by men, women, and children. The oil-on-canvas format allowed the artist to render the figures, household objects, and scattered eggs with luminous clarity and tactile detail, inviting viewers to linger over the everyday scene. Created during the Enlightenment, when French painters increasingly turned to genre subjects drawn from ordinary life, the work reflects a broader cultural interest in moral storytelling through humble settings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European Paintings coll...
About the Artist
Jean-Baptiste Greuze · 1725–1805
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) was a French painter whose moralistic genre scenes and expressive portraits made him one of the most celebrated and controversial artists of the eighteenth century. Born in Tournus, Burgundy, Greuze traveled to Paris in his youth and trained under Charles Grandon before gaining admission to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, where he made a sensationa...