If you broke the pitcher

In the middle of the engraving, a woman with a rather coarse face is beating a child with a shoe, and we can see her face with a pained expression. In the background there are clothes hanging on two ropes, as well as a basket, which leads us to think that the woman was doing the laundry. The reason for the beating is that the boy has broken a pitcher, which lies shattered in the foreground.

The three manuscripts explaining the engravings in the series of The Caprices emphasise the mother's disproportionate reaction to the child's mischief.

Education was, in the minds of the Enlightenment, the foundation on which to build the happiness and progress of any society. It is possible that this Goyaesque engraving has to do with an anecdote told by the editor of The Censor, a Madrid newspaper known to Goya's circle of enlightened friends. The latter reported that he had once entered a friend's house and caught him beating his son. He asked him what was the cause of this punishment, to which the father replied that his son had broken a Chinese cup. In the aforementioned newspaper, it was common to hear anecdotes of this kind criticising the excessive nature of certain punishments. These punishments did more harm than good, as they confused children's ability to discern real wrongdoing. In addition, Goya may have echoed the theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (Zurich, 1746-Brugg, 1827) against punishment as a pedagogical method.

The education of children appears in many other engravings in this series, as well as in the painting entitled The letter with blood enters, in which the painter captures a scene in which a child is brutally taught in a school.