Painting Garlic

Diego Velasquez, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1618, London

It's mid September. An email came today that it is time to order seed garlic.  Where I live on  Cape Cod, garlic gets planted in October, grows all winter, and is harvested in July.  It's a wondrous thing to see things poking up out of the frozen earth when all else is dead.  Taking a break from some work, I stared at a patch of ground that I will make into a new bed for leeks and garlic.  Then I came back inside and thought about paintings of garlic.

This post comes back around to Brittany by the end, as thinking about garlic reminded me of my visit to Le Pouldu in June, with Caroline Boyle Turner.


Garlic is such humble fare. Velasquez puts it in the foreground of this painting to emphasize the humility and ordinariness of the kitchen scene.  Garlic, eggs and fish form the foreground here of Spanish Baroque naturalism.

 Velasquez, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, detail.

A brief but informative article from the NIH, on the historical and medical uses of garlic, it is explained that the plant originated in Central Asia, but was in wide use throughout Europe two thousand years ago.  The Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Babylonians, Greeks and many others had many uses for garlic (and its antibacterial effects), particularly for the prevention of stomach infections.  It was fed to workers and slaves to make them stronger.


" You and your apron-men; you that stood so up much on the voice of occupation and the breath of garlic-eaters!"           --Coriolanus



The Romans spread the plant all over the Empire and it was planted in many monasteries' gardens. Botanical texts attest to its medical uses as "the penicillin of the poor." 

Bourdichon Hours, 15th century

After reading a smattering of articles and anecdotes about the history of garlic in European cooking, it seems fair to say that it was a staple ingredient of Spanish and Portuguese food, but that it may have only slowly crept north and was only very recently accepted in British kitchens.

Garlic, like onions, was staple peasant fare that was thought to strengthen the constitution and ward off pestilence.

Harvesting garlic, Tacuinum sanitatis, 15th century.  BN Paris.

Sixteenth-century French barber-surgeon to several kings, Ambroise Paré wrote that "rustics and workmen  will be able to eat a few cloves of garlic or shallots with bread and butter and good wine if they can provide it, to charm the bad vapors (les brouées)  then will go to the work that God calls them to." Garlic apparently, warded off the bad vapors, but also gave underclasses a particular pong:

  "he would mouth with a beggar, though she smelt brown bread and garlic."
                                                                                                                 --Measure for Measure

Joachim Beuckelaer, Vegetable Vendor, later 16h century. Valenciennes.

Garlic is a common vegetable in 16th century market scenes and still life paintings (especially in conjunction with fish).

 
Baltazar Gomes Figuera, Still Life with Fish, mid to late 17th cent. Paris, Louvre

Vincent Van Gogh was well aware of the Dutch Still life tradition, especially after his experiences working as an art dealer and copying prints that he admired. During his time in Paris, he produced this grimy little painting of Fish and garlic. Unlike the plump, shiny surfaces of the seventeenth century still lives, or even the humble string of fish from Chardin's later Fast Day Menu, these fish appear dessicated, leathery, so far from the sea that they will make a very ascetic meal, only relieved by a clove of garlic on a chunk of bread.  Bohemian lunch in the studio.

Van Gogh, Still Life with Bloaters (Herring), 1887

Chardin, Fast Day Menu, Paris, Louvre.

Garlic appears in a  late painting by Chardin, Glass of Water and Coffeepot.  In spite of its ascetic spareness, it was admired by the Goncourt brothers who praised it as "a marvel, this little picture, in which the insignificance of the composition sets off to best advantage the artistic wisdom of the best still-life painter of all the schools." 

Chardin, Glass of Water and Coffeepot, c. 1761.

Romantic and realist painters Boudin and Jacques include heads of garlic in their rustic rural still lives that again speak of the simple life, close to the earth-- the unpretentious meal-- perhaps of the artist-- that emulates peasant life.

Eugene Boudin, Still Life with a Pumpkin.  Le Havre.

Charles Jacques, Still Life.  mid to late 19th cent, Rouen.

From Edouard Manet's early years comes a fragmentary still life painting of garlic, originally part of a much larger composition, The Gypsies (1862) that the artist cut in three in 1867.

Manet, Still Life with Bag and Garlic, c. 1862, Louvre Abu Dhabi

The print of this image retains the original composition-- there are no known photographs of the painting. The garlic and rough jute bag were in the lower right corner of the painting, lying on the ground.  The two heads of garlic plainly sit there, having rolled out of the bag or perhaps dinner will happen very plainly here, with only the simplest of ingredients.  Garlic again is paired with the lowest of social class, the much repressed, feared and romanticized figure of the gypsy.  Like Van Gogh's later painting, garlic is part of the "bohemian" palette.

When the painting was displayed in 1863 and 1867, critics immediately spotted the "Spanishness" of the composition and related it to Velasquez.

The Gypsy.

 Manet's garlic painting was acquired by the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2009, where it is displayed along with another fragment of the original painting, The Gypsy. The Boy with a Jug, the third fragment, is in Chicago.

The Boy with a Jug

Meijer de Haan, working with Paul Gauguin in Brittany at Le Pouldu in 1889, painted a still life with garlic and a pewter pot.

Two paintings by Edouard Manet, The Bohemian and Still Life with Bag and Garlic (1861-62), which were cut from their original canvas by Manet himself and had long been separated, have now been reunited at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. They are seen with the engraving Les Gitanos (1862, Paris, Biblithèque nationale de France, department des estampes et de la photographie), which shows the artist’s original composition. Paul Cézanne’s highly abstract Rocks Near the Caves Above Château Noir (1904, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) is one of the artist’s late works that had a deep impact on the avant-garde of the early 20th century. Its visual synthesis of forms and colours, blended to capture the essence of a landscape, was one of the paths that Piet Mondrian meditated upon to create his pure abstraction, whose quintessence can be found in his Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black (1922).

More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/31077/Talking-Art-Louvre-Abu-Dhabi-Features-the-Museum-s-First-Acquisitions#.UjNOqLzlXEg[/url]
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Meijer de Haan, Still Life with Garlic and Pewter Pot, 1889

Gauguin, Still Life with Onions, 1889

 Although de Haan is clearly emulating Gauguin's (and Cézanne's) brushstrokes and color contrasts, the garlic has a quality that differs from the way that Gauguin would treat an onion or apple -- as in this painting from the same period with a Japanese print in the background.

The garlic isn't solid in the same way. De Haan sees color between the cloves, in the shadows, the breaks where each segment will pull away. Larger cloves would have been saved for replanting.  Perhaps these came from a local garden, mulched by the rich seaweed from the shore.

 De Haan also paints the garlic's roots, uncut as yet, that connected it to the earth.  Like the lumpy brown potatoes behind them, these are things of the dirt.   Their stalks are tied together, perhaps to hang them up to dry.  

Garlic on a table top at a small café in Brittany, at a time of collaboration and friendship-- an intimate bohemia at the end of the earth.

Two paintings by Edouard Manet, The Bohemian and Still Life with Bag and Garlic (1861-62), which were cut from their original canvas by Manet himself and had long been separated, have now been reunited at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. They are seen with the engraving Les Gitanos (1862, Paris, Biblithèque nationale de France, department des estampes et de la photographie), which shows the artist’s original composition. Paul Cézanne’s highly abstract Rocks Near the Caves Above Château Noir (1904, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) is one of the artist’s late works that had a deep impact on the avant-garde of the early 20th century. Its visual synthesis of forms and colours, blended to capture the essence of a landscape, was one of the paths that Piet Mondrian meditated upon to create his pure abstraction, whose quintessence can be found in his Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black (1922).

More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/31077/Talking-Art-Louvre-Abu-Dhabi-Features-the-Museum-s-First-Acquisitions#.UjNOqLzlXEg[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org

Garlic on the kitchen table in the newly recreated Maison Marie Henri in Le Pouldu, June 2013.

For more art and food, see this popular blog:  feastingonart.com

William Scott, Still Life with Garlic, 1947, Oil on canvas, 64.8 x 81.2cm (25½ x 32 in)

Fermanagh County Museum at Enniskillen Castle

See this blog post for a fascinating look at the "Onion Johnnies" of Roscoff, Breton farmers who crossed the Channel to sell onions (from the handlebars of their bibybles) in England in  the mid 19th century.

Or read this article on "Culinary Ugliness."


 
 

Two paintings by Edouard Manet, The Bohemian and Still Life with Bag and Garlic (1861-62), which were cut from their original canvas by Manet himself and had long been separated, have now been reunited at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. They are seen with the engraving Les Gitanos (1862, Paris, Biblithèque nationale de France, department des estampes et de la photographie), which shows the artist’s original composition. Paul Cézanne’s highly abstract Rocks Near the Caves Above Château Noir (1904, Paris, Musée d’Orsay) is one of the artist’s late works that had a deep impact on the avant-garde of the early 20th century. Its visual synthesis of forms and colours, blended to capture the essence of a landscape, was one of the paths that Piet Mondrian meditated upon to create his pure abstraction, whose quintessence can be found in his Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black (1922).

More Information: http://artdaily.com/news/31077/Talking-Art-Louvre-Abu-Dhabi-Features-the-Museum-s-First-Acquisitions#.UjNOqLzlXEg[/url]
Copyright © artdaily.org