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Jean-Baptiste Greuze, the son of a builder, was born in the reign of Louis XV. Apprenticed to a painter at Lyons, he acquired a ready technique which fitted him, upon his arrival to Paris at the age of thirty, to exploit the growing need by people of substance for succh concealment of the solid realities of life as the romantic movement offered. Greuze made immense sums of money from his paintings.

Concerning the girls in Greuze's pictures, it was the opinion of the Goncourts, in part, that they show "a beauty which always has its eyes disarmed, the mouth glowing with a misty light, ... the innocence of eighteenth-century Paris, always close to a fall". The Goncourts did not like Greuze. Camille Faust, a critic who did, considers "The Borken Pitcher" "a fine psychological bit, at once bold and subtle, which proves Greuze had a profound sensitivity to feminie expression. It is a study so strong that its science purifies its subject."

So much for critics. Of Greuze it can at least be said that his response to the patronage of the eighteenth-century upper middle class foreshadowed in kind what his spiritual descendants of nineteenth-century England were to produce at the behest of England's new industrial peerage.

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