As an avid art historian, William Merritt Chase was well aware of the broken jug as a visual metaphor for lost innocence. He would have known Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s famous image La Cruche Cassé in the Louvre. Here, Chase changed Greuze’s young aristocrat into an awkward peasant. He made her abashed posture more poignant with the addition of huge wooden sabots (clogs). The costume, damaged pottery vessel, and brooding background all have been rendered in the dark, expressive palette of the Munich School, where Chase worked during the early 1870s. When Broken Jug was shown in 1877 at the National Academy of Design, critic Marianna Van Rensselaer commented in The American Art Review that “The subject is hackneyed, of course, but I think that Mr. Chase’s treatment of it will be found sufficiently original. The child stands against a landscape background so well and appropriately painted that one regrets not oftener finding such in his compositions.... The color is rich and agreeable...” The rather astonishing plaster frame is unique and may have been made locally.