Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Broken Eggs (1756)
Greuze made his reputation as a painter of moralistic family scenes. In this one, an old woman (perhaps the mother) confronts the lover of a young girl and points to the eggs that have fallen out of a basket, a symbol of lost virginity. Denis Diderot praised Greuze’s work as “morality in paint,” but the paintings often had an erotic subtext. (© Francis G. Mayer / Corbis.)