The 19th century French Impressionists tended to have a flair for creating exceptionally appealing food paintings. Moving the genre of the food still life away from a focus on technical perfection, Impressionists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Gustave Caillebotte stressed visual and gustatory perceptions in their works, with tantalizing results.
From Strawberries to Onions with Renoir
Of the original French Impressionist group, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was often one of the best food painters. Renoir applied his tendency to create visions of dewy and fulsome women to also paint luscious ripe peaches, plums, and otherwise highly sensual fruits. Renoir could even turn a seemingly less lovely vegetable into a voluptuous entity, as seen in his 1890 Cauliflower and Pomegranates—if he wasn’t making onions appear to be small, precious objects in brown papery skins.
Renoir’s 1905 Strawberries is gorgeous not just because of its title fruit, but also because of the bright tart contrast of yellow lemons and a blue and white sugar bowl. Renoir’s many-peopled circa 1880 Luncheon of the Boating Party was one of his masterpieces, but beyond the painting’s featured men, women and an adorable little dog are the intriguing remains of the luncheon itself. The pedestal bowl with its cascade of grapes, the bottles of wine, the half-empty glasses, plates and rumpled tablecloth suggest a good time had by all, with food as the happily shared element.
Caillebotte’s Oysters and Fruit Stands
Another fine meal captured for eternity is found in Gustave Caillebotte’s 1881 Still Life with Oysters. Without laboring over detail, Caillebotte used deft strokes to show fresh oysters on the half-shell with their accompanying complement of lemon wedges, wine, and sparkling glassware.
Caillebotte could be a shade clinical in his depictions of plucked chickens, raw beef or fish waiting to be cooked, but he excelled with an assortment of post-prep hors d’oeuvres and jewel-like fruits in white-papered market boxes. In the latter 1881-82 painting titled Fruit Displayed on a Stand, Caillebotte used one of his unique perspectives to frame a tight view of neatly arranged yet vivid berries, figs, pears and other offerings beneath a top border of lush dark green leaves.
Monet’s Eggs and Manet’s Asparagus
Many of Claude Monet’s food-related still life works were done in his earlier years as an artist and therefore kept to more conventional standards of realistic depiction. The 1907 Still Life with Eggs, however, was painted when Monet was a mature talent and features dreamy tones of white, ecru, light blue, gray and pale brown, a palette that gives a mere bowl of eggs a whole other implied level of the promise of a new day.
Édouard Manet was not officially a member of the French Impressionists, but he did have a strong influence on their style and was also friends with many of them. Manet’s food paintings are generally excellent examples of less is more, such as the sure brushstrokes of his Bunch of Asparagus, a painting that was actually commissioned by a foodie patron. And while Manet’s famed and enigmatic The Luncheon on the Grass isn’t really about the picnic menu, the simplicity of his Four Mandarin Oranges suggests nothing more than pure citrusy taste and juiciness.
A testimony to the French Impressionists’ food finesse is that despite vast advances in the field of color photography, food illustrations are still often done in an alluringly impressionistic style—or the very same 19th century works of the above artists often grace articles on cuisine and cooking in modern times.
Sources
- Luncheon of the Boating Party -- The Phillips Collection
- Still Delightful -- Smithsonian.com
- The Private Lives of the Impressionists -- Sue Roe (HarperCollins Publishers, 2006)
