Les oeufs cassés: A shepherdess startled by a drover and his cattle in a pastoral landscape

This is a good example of Jean-Baptiste Huet's work in the petite manière of genre painting popularised by François Boucher. Les oeufs cassés is comparable to Greuze's painting of the same name (Metropolitan Musem of Art, New York), whose source for the iconography derives from seventeenth century Dutch painting, notably the work of Frans van Mieris the Elder. This picture depicts a peasant girl who, upon being startled by a herdsman, drops her basket of eggs, alluding to the loss of her virginity. The moralising character and sensibilité, the complement of the age of reason, of Huet's Les oeufs cassés is characteristic of this period.