An unframed allegorical oil on canvas, after the 1771 original by Jean Baptiste Greuze. in which a young blue-eyed girl in high colour and dressed in white is shown cradling a broken jug in a garden scene.

Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725 – 1805) was a French painter of portraits, historical and genre scenes. He quarrelled with the French Academy who would admit him only as a mere ‘genre painter’ and he died in extreme poverty in the Louvre. His reputation was later redeemed and he has become a byword for the French late 18th Century sensibility.

The meditation on loss-of-innocence which Greuze presents in the allegorical shattering of the pitcher is a subject he would explore in a number of works including Broken Eggs (1756) and Young Girl Weeping over Her Dead Bird (1757).