グルーズ

割れた卵 1756年

この絵は、取り返しがつかないことを暗示しています。娘は貞操が失われて悲しみに暮れています。そして卵が割れています。両方とも取り返しがつきません。しかし老女は娘のことよりも、卵が壊れたことのほうを問題にして怒っています。

In moralizing genre subjects such as this, Greuze brilliantly formulated a solution to the impasse that arcane history subjects posed to artists and the public. At the Salon of 1757, a critic even declared that the pose of this young servant girl, whose loss of virginity is symbolized by the broken eggs, was worthy of a history painter. Greuze struck upon such subjects, based in part on seventeenth-century Dutch painting (the girl’s pose actually derives from Frans van Mieris the Elder), while still a student in Rome, though he would spend the next decades stubbornly in pursuit of the official title of history painter.

2022年春メトロポリタン美術館展 国立新美術館