Breaking the Foreground Line

What happens when you crop a figure along the bottom edge?

When composing a picture, it's sometimes effective put an element in the direct foreground, cropped by the bottom edge.

Here's an example by Henryk Siemiradzky (1843-1902), which doesn't break the foreground line.

The bottom of the composition along the frame edge is empty. Nothing wrong with that, but it can make the picture feel a bit more formal, more…