The Broken Mirror

Greuze painted The Broken Mirror around 1763, one of his female head studies in which a young woman contemplates the broken mirror she holds — the standard symbol of vanity confronted with its own futility. The broken mirror was among the richest symbolic objects in the eighteenth-century iconographic vocabulary, combining the vanitas tradition (beauty's transience), the moral critique of excessive self-regard, and the ambiguity of self-knowledge. Greuze's young woman's expression combines beauty with the first shadow of its loss, giving the work the characteristic Greuze quality of the moral encoded within the sensory pleasure of a beautiful female face.

Greuze renders the dismayed young woman with his characteristic soft modeling and luminous flesh tones. The careful rendering of the domestic interior and the girl's expression of distress demonstrate his skill in creating psychologically suggestive genre scenes.