The Broken Pitcher by Bouguereau Postcard

The Broken Pitcher by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1891, is an oil painting on canvas of a young woman sitting by a well in a country landscape, a broken water jug at her feet. The subtly idealised realism of the scene leads the viewer’s eye to the sad, somewhat sombre expression of the girl’s face. The painter’s inclusion of the broken pitcher in the foreground, in which she cannot carry the water from the well, would have symbolised her lost innocence and purity in the minds of the 19th century public. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825 - 1905) was a French painter who trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Villa Medici in Rome. He exhibited with great success in the French Salon and became one of most renowned and wealthy artists of his era. Bouguereau worked in the French Academic tradition, a school of late 19th century modern painters who concentrated on the human figure and classical subjects in highly polished works of optical realism. His main interest was the female figure, usually rendered in classical, finely drawn contours, in subjects that were often sentimental. Bouguereau's reputation diminished greatly in the 20th century with the rise of Modernism, but interest in his traditional figurative paintings has surged again in recent years.