filthy peasants

This is an expansion and revision of a talk, "Rot to Cash Crop: Waste, Thrift and Recuperation in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture" that I presented at "The Green Nineteenth  Century" in Milwaukee, WI (2009). Some of this material goes back to my dissertation (2001, NYU).



To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.

                                                                                    Samuel Beckett, “Molloy” 1955


...one of the most radical of the moral distinctions between human beings and most of the lower animals; that of which the absence, more than of anything else, renders men bestial; [is] the quality of cleanliness. Can anything be more entirely artificial? Children, and the lower classes of most countries, seem to be actually fond of dirt: the vast majority of the human race are indifferent to it: whole nations of otherwise civilized and cultivated human beings tolerate it in some of its worst forms, and only a very small minority are consistently offended by it. Indeed the universal law of the subject appears to be, that uncleanliness offends only those to whom it is unfamiliar, so that those who have lived in so artificial a state as to be unused to it in any form, are the sole persons whom it disgusts in all forms. Of all virtues this is the most evidently not instinctive, but a triumph over instinct. Assuredly neither cleanliness nor the love of cleanliness is natural to man, but only the capacity of acquiring a love of cleanliness.

John Stuart Mill,   On Nature 1874

Discussions of dirt, following the insights of Anthropologist Mary Douglas, position it as a relative value, a conceptual moving target.  Yet dirt itself is the literal base of rural culture.  Representations of dirtiness in 19th century visual culture, literature and criticism articulate relationships of class, place and value: relationships posited between the viewer and the rural worker; the bodies and living spaces of rural people and animals;  the place of an image's exhibition and the place it depicts; the value of an image as object and the value (or lack thereof) of accumulated waste. But the visual ordering of base matter as waste, filth or dirt is not simple or absolute. This post positions images amid snippets of travel narratives and other texts to examine how all of these representations work in the ongoing processes of making and interpreting signs of place, class, sexuality and identity.

Pioneer Woman with a wheelbarrow of Dried  Buffalo Dung.

Pay to Pass: A woman pays a street sweeper to cross a gangplank over a dirty street (color litho)
From a series of types on the streets of Paris, c. 1820s after Horace Vernet.

Dirt may at times be matter out of place, filth may be tidied and transformed, waste may be recuperated.  Even processes of decay and corruption may be framed as purifying. Visual representations of human and animal closeness and the associated filth of contact not only participate in its ordering, sorting and transformation: they also mark out potential values for the accumulation or re-cycling of this material.  As they do so, they position identities for the bodies that make contact with this material as well as for the viewer who watches.  As the comparison of these first two images suggests, one’s relationship to bodily waste, whether human or animal very clearly suggests positions of class and place—as the lady pays to avoid the turd in the city street, the pioneer woman picks up buffalo chips-- one would presume by hand—far off on the peripheral frontier. Mary Douglas, writing in Purity and Danger (1966) argues that dealing with the dirty can be threatening, for it entails negotiating that which is ambiguous or anomalous.  Douglas’s ideas have been built upon for decades in cultural studies to suggest that filth or dirtiness as a material and conceptual state can be understood as an problem of slippage from stable categorization and contradiction. She notes that pre-capitalist societies resolved these contradictions through purification rituals.

According to Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic study of abjection (1982), bodily waste and other forms of defilement are “what life withstands” … for  “dung signifies the other side of the border—the place where I am not" (3). Within modern capitalist culture,  ritual is no longer invoked to successfully resolve this problem of waste, for now contradictory notions of use value and exchange value are bound up in this system. Kristeva shows us that as we work to constitute ourselves as individuals, we try to extricate or distance ourselves from that which we term waste.  Yet as literary critic Anne McClintock remarks, building upon Douglas and Kristeva, the abject inhabits “ the cusp of domesticity and market, industry and empire” and it “returns to haunt modernity as its constitutive, inner repudiation: the rejected from which one does not part”( Imperial Leather, 72).


 Olivier Perrin, one of the first illustrators to represent rural Breton life, includes a pair of pigs feeding from a bucket that sits beside the cradle of a sleeping child. The shape of the bucket is echoed by the covered three-legged cooking pot that sits beside the wooden bench, that itself is before the open box bed (the pot placed there looks suspiciously like a chamber-pot). This one-room cottage is thus a very mixed space of work (the mother spins), sleep (for the child and father who dozes by the fire) cooking and the feeding of animals.

For many nineteenth travel writers, identifying their encounters with rural life as dirty or filthy was a way of both defining and imaginatively crossing culturally constructed boundaries of gender, class and location. Sociologist Alain Corbin notes that early travelers in the French countryside, ill-prepared by reading the idylls of pastoral poetry, were often shocked by the filthy life of the peasants they encountered. In many rural households, farm animals and people lived side by side in winter—the heat of the stable warming the domestic space: “the stench of dung coupled with the odors of laundry and washing-up, the exhalations of putrid and fermented scents from stable and dairy located too close by were the basic elements of the picture” (156). These typical elements of the Breton cottage interior (frequently re-presented today in many museums of rural life in Brittany) were repeated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in prints, paintings and photographs.

Olivier Perrin, The Cradle, illustration from Galerie Bretonne ou vie des Bretons de l’Armorique c. 1808.

Charles Géniaux, Common room of a peasant house in Morbihan, Brittany, open to the stable, early 20th century (MuCEM)

Others notes that  “with bare feet, [having] cleaned out their animals, or been out with a muck-cart... [they] do not hesitate, just as they are, to go to bed or to put back on their clothes (Vigarello, 197). In line with Douglas, in travellers' modern notions of hygiene, there was no space for farm animals in the house. The early 20th century photograph of a peasant house in Brittany by Charles Géniaux, a photographer of everyday life in Brittany, who was based in Rennes, includes the hallmarks of the Breton cottage interior: the dish rack on the left with its Quimper faience, and the closed doors of the wooden box-bed on the right.

a typical Breton box-bed

Between these pieces of carved, wooden, built-in furniture sits a boy in wooden clogs and work pants who turns away from the camera and toward the heads of three cows who are eating from the rough wooden trough before them. The animal space of the barn and the human spaces of the home are wed together, again,  to suggest that the peasant family draws no boundaries between domestic space of eating and sleeping and animal dirt and odor.

Giovanni Segantini, Two Mothers, 1889.
Galleria d’Arte Moderna Milan.

Alpine Symbolist painter Giovanni Segantini, in The Two Mothers pairs a women with a sleeping child aside a cow and calf.  Both offspring have presumably just nursed: the woman sits on a milking stool, although there are no signs of her milk pail. The milk is both there, and already consumed. For Kristeva, the maternal body is made particularly taboo and powerful, with its permeable boundaries of self and other, its abject fluids and familiarity with waste. Her writings on abjection posit it as an experience that establishes boundaries -- such as those between self and other or human and animal.  Human breast milk is a particularly abject fluid in modern culture because it is on  a border between two distinct entities or territories. A boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the non-human” (75).  Segantini's scene seems constructed solely to spell out the  closeness of peasant and animal maternal instinct. For this rural woman, the act of nursing an infant in the stable, rural female animality is naturalized: her working body is conflated with her bovine double (Nochlin, 133). Fingers that press to her the sleeping child echo the dangling teats of the cow who has recently calved. By the rosy glow of the lantern, Segantini invites us to to imagine the warm smells of cow, hay and sleeping baby. Like the Perrin drawing and the Géniaux photograph, the image conflates human domesticity and domesticated animals.

Gauguin, Woman in the Hay with Pigs: In the Full Heat of the Day, 1888.

An overt erotic charge is often produced by the closeness of peasant women to farm animals. In a painting from his time in the South of France, Gauguin depicts  a rural female worker, wearing her cap but nude to the waist. Beside her, kicked by her clog is the hind end of a pig, whose presence heightens the perception of her own animal sexuality (Silverman 230).  In the foreground is another yellow/orange form: is this more hay or another animal rump? This thing, the pig, the clog are illogical fragments that just barely make sense.  Her sunburnt, pink claw of a hand is outstretched—emphasizing the exposure of her skin to the sun—and now to the scratchy rawness of hay.  Her bare breasts are pressed to the hay bale that is strangely blue (in the shade?)  or is it a boulder or something else peeled back (like laundry), furled out or unfolded like the clothes at her waist? Images of noonday rest had often implied a sexual encounter, but this single, partially undressed woman seems to be having an imagined sensual experience with the materials of the landscape (and the pigs are only getting in the way).

Gauguin painted this in Arles, where all workers tried to escape the noonday sun of summer--but it could hardly have been from observation as this image imagines a quite uncomfortably tactile or haptic encounter with various and ambiguous sorts of materiality.  As William Cohen, writes in  FILTH,   "by the time one has encountered and repudiated filth, it is too late—the subject is already besmirched by it.  In this way, filth challenges the very dichotomy between subject and object. It does so according to  a psychoanalytical logic, whereby repulsion and attraction unconsciously converge, and phenomenologically as well: the filth of the object defiles the subject who, identifying it as such, has had to rub up against it.” The longer I look at Gauguin's puzzling painting, the stranger I feel: sunburnt, itchy and irritated.





The peasant images of Symbolists Gauguin and Segantini built upon an earlier nineteenth century tradition of the peasant's relationship to dirt and farm animals in realist imagery.  The "authentic" rustic reputations of painters John Constable and Jean Francois Millet depended upon their intimate and material knowledge of the rural landscape and its labors, including the digging and spreading of animal manure.

A Muck Spreader, c. 1830.  Popular British Print.

Constable’s View of Dedham of 1814-5 (Boston), features a great dung-heap before an expansive view of the artist’s native Suffolk landscape. The remarkable anecdote that always accompanies this painting recounts its commission as a wedding gift to a young lady as a “symbol of good husbandry.” The image of the dung spreader was a common rustic type of laborer but Constable locates his workers on the other side of the pile from us—further back than in initial studies for this painting-- this filthy labor is thus naturalized as a seasonal task performed in the cyclical time of the rural landscape. Michael Rosenthal writes on the inclusion of manure as a marker of the work's modernity: “Constable’s iconography was resolutely contemporary, and the last thing you would associate with Claude would be a dunghill...manure [was] essential for heavier crops, indicated that these farmers knew their business.” (1983, 86). Rosenthal also notes that several English poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries wrote odes to muck heaps, and that the Georgic mode of praising the intelligent management of the land could accommodate this ‘low’ subject.

Jean-François Millet, Peasant Spreading Manure, 1855. Raleigh, N.C.

Jean-François Millet repeated the image of the dung-spreader in prints, drawings and paintings. In the painting Peasant Spreading Manure, a man forks out heavy, soiled mats of animal bedding, to create a landscape of animal droppings.  As a seasonal task, spring "manuring" meant that the fields would be fertile for another summer.

Some of Millet's supportive critics praised the poetic ability of his painting painting to transcend the filthy: one reviewer wryly comments that ever since the fables of la Fontaine “there had been none but Millet who could find pearls in manure.”(A. de Belloy Salon de 1868). Yet other critics complained that the widespread representation of rural life in Salon painting of the 1860s had brought on an invasion of village life that dragged in with it “its wooden clogs and manure.” (Alexis de Calonne, “Salon de 1861” La Revue Contemporaine).

The reception of Millet's realism, like that of Courbet, had been bound up in dirt. Nadar’s 1852 caricature of the painter at work resembles either a human profile or a very strange, hilly landscape. On further inspection, perhaps both: a portrait of animated land, quickened to human likeness in the tradition of popular 16th-century Netherlandish anthropomorphic landscapes-- but most likely a parody of the Sower of 1850, whose hatted figure, striding downhill under wheeling birds, has been radically simplified and combined such that the figure and land (indeed the figure and ground) are one.

Millet, The Sower, 1850, Boston MFA.

The caricatured image echoes both Théophile Gautier’s comment that The Sower seems to be ‘painted with the very earth he is sowing,’ and Michelet’s earlier description of the French peasant --as a "man of the earth"--who lives completely in it --who seems formed in its image. In Nadar’s version, The Sower is a remade by the caricatured Millet in a portrait that transcends likeness, preferring primordial matter.  Because its painter uses earth-working tools rather than the usual implements of painting, the signifier and the signified are brought ever closer: binding up its dirty literalness in a tight semiotic bundle.  The caricature neatly encapsulates the material confluence of paint, dirt, painter and peasant body in the mid-19th-century critical reception of Realism.  It is important to clarify that, in this body of discourse, dirt is spoken of as soil or ‘la terre’ when it is the literal earth worked by the peasant; yet dirt is also ‘matter out of place,’ in the terms laid out by Douglas when the body of the peasant and its degree of dirtiness is at stake.  Although a semantic disjunction between French (terre/sale) and English (dirt/dirty) would seem to complicate the equation, the terms ‘sale’ and ‘terreux’ frequently collide in 19th-century description of Realist paint surfaces, particularly those describing lower class bodies.  Although dirt was the base and basis of rural reality, critics found painting that brought too much of it to the surface blurred the boundaries between medium and message.

 Man with a Wheelbarrow, also known as Peasant Returning from the Manure Heap 1848-52  (Indianapolis Museum of Art).

Millet's many images of peasants moving muck from barn to heap to field, depict a network of human, animal and earth, all generally subsumed under the category of "nature."

Michael Thompson's Rubbish Theory of 1979 discusses economic systems under which waste objects come to be revalued. Whereas most commodities are conceived of as either transient or durable, many things can move between categories—thus waste may be recuperated as valuable matter. Yet Thompson argues that the very concept of value is predicated on – and needs-- the idea of rubbish.  Extending this discussion, Cohen remarks that “anything designated filthy cannot be reused, at least until it is renamed or reconceived as waste or trash, which can be recycled. The potential for this reimagining means that the regenerative fantasy hovers at the edge of the filth that excludes it. In this way too, filth seems at once to occupy one side of the subject / object divide and to undo the opposition itself."

In Zola's Earth, recycling or compost mania grips Zola’s “modern farmer” Hourdequin, who, he tells us has experiment with the fertile potential of a vast array of filth: from “road-sweepings” “wool-waste” to “odd shovelfuls of muck, dead animals, decomposing dog-droppings or filth drained from ponds,” he has run the gamut of waste. Yet, at the end of this exhaustive inventory, he declares, “there’s nothing like good farm muck. The trouble is there’s never enough of it. And then again people spoil it, they don’t know either how to prepare it or use it.” (392) Thus waste itself may be wasted when the chance is not taken to reclaim it. Zola’s “realist” novels certainly expressed many a bestial fantasy about the lives and “natural” drives of the peasant, yet these descriptions of peasant manure hoarding ring true with many environmental histories of farming that recount the scarcity of manure in Europe (that drove the global trade in guano).

The nineteenth century peasant “manure economy” was summed up by one German pastor who remarked that “The peasant will do everything to get a lot of manure.”  In his memoirs,  Breton farmer Jean-Marie Deguinet (1834-1904), himself an expert in converting wasteland to fertile fields (and reusing even dishwater in animal feed) likewise mentions that the worth of a farmer could be measured by his  manure pile.

seaweed

“"There are heroes in the seaweed. There are children in the morning."

--Suzanne, Leonard Cohen. 

I have always had a thing for seaweed.  And I tend to photograph it on almost every beach. 
Stepping into a Tidal Pool at Ruguénez, Brittany, 2006.  

Something about this photo kept my attention: I kept it on my computer screen for a few years, lurking behind a clutter of file icons. Perhaps it's the embodied sensation of stepping into this pool, looking into its indefinite depths, yet distracted by the reflection of me taking this picture that floats on the surface.

A tidal pool near Doonbeg, Co. Clare, Ireland, 2007

And here, too, clarity comes from shadow. Where my shadow falls, like the shadow of the rocks, there is a clear view to the sand below the surface. 

On a new beach, there is the lure of unknown tidal pools, where, along with other sea-life, seaweed forms are framed by the collaboration of rocks and the retreating sea. They are a sort of landscape, or nature-assemblage, that you apprehend from above as you hop along the exposed rocks.

A tidal pool near Doonbeg, Co. Clare, Ireland, 2007

Portivy, June 2013

 Alexandre Séon, La sirene (The Mermaid) 1896.  Musée d’Art Moderne-Saint-Étienne

The intertidal zone is a place of hybrid creatures and sea-people such as the selkies who shed their seal skins to become almost human, or the mermaids who haul out on the rocks. Brittany, like many other Atlantic Celtic places, had its version of mermaid myths: Anatole Le Braz's short story "Le Sang de la Sirène" (The Mermaid's Blood, 1901) tells of the cursed fishermen of the Isle of Sein who suffer the consequences of a mermaid being kept as a wife by an island man. Symbolist painter Alexandre Séon wreathes his siren in sensuous kelp, whose fronds mimic the shape of the waves and the color of her tail. The reddish brown is picked up again on the red sails of a Breton sardine boat that catches her attention.

But seaweed can also be disgusting: when I slip on its slime trying to get to the water, when its fishy damp rotting smell is drawing flies, it seems somewhere between animal and vegetable. It catches other things up in it—and lies tangled on the strand in impure piles that combine waste of many forms in uncanny assortment.  Hiding moisture under its top crust, it reanimates, changes color and is again viscous with each tide. I look up references to seaweed on Cape Cod: descriptions of popular sandy beaches tout the absence of seaweed on the shore. Pure sand: the prim beach aesthetic mimics the shaven beach body, scraped clean of nature.

Jules Michelet describes (with horror) a vast spectacle of rotten seaweed in his widely read History of France (1847), where the coast of Brittany near St Malo seems a veritable wasteland: "by turns, as the tide ebbs and flows, a peninsula and an island, and bordered with foul and fetid shoals where the seaweed rots at will.” This shifting landscape of uncertain bounds is covered by polluting rot that corrupts the shoreline, the indeterminate margins of sea and land.  This sense of disgust is echoed by travel writer 
Thomas Adolphus Trollope, writing in 1889 on the Point du Raz: "There nothing tells of the work or presence of man save certain huge heaps of sea-weed gathered for manure, which for some hundred yards line the rough path on either side, and speak to one of the senses so very vehemently that we almost thought of abandoning our enterprise and turning in flight. These vast masses of seaweed are left to ferment and decay, by which process their fertilizing effect on the land is much increased; but the process of this improvement produces an odour the most overpoweringly offensive of any I ever experienced."


Yet where some saw (and smelled) rot and decay, many found fertile opportunity. When dead seaweed washed up in abundance on the the Brittany coast, forragers and harvesters went to the limits of the earth, the intertidal zone exposed by the duirnal tides that recede the most at new and full moon and are exceptionally low at the equinoxes. (The tides are exceptionally high there: the average worldwide is just 2 meters but in Brittany this ranges from 5.45 meters at Penmarc’h, to 12 meters in the Bay of Saint-Malo and more than 16 meters in the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel).
 
 Artists saw opportunity, too. I started collecting images of seaweed harvesting, especially in Brittany. I saw this painting by Alfred Guillou at a summer exhibition in St. Pol de Léon in 2008. He must have been fascinated with the image of the strapping, bare-armed, seaweed gathering woman.

detail:Alfred Guillou,  Ramasseuse de goémon (Seaweed Gatherer). 1889. Morlaix Museum.

In the 1880s, Guillou worked in Concarneau, on the Brittany coast, where, along with Théophile Deyrolle, he founded the informal "School of Concarneau" and attracted a range of international artists.  This monumental painting positions the powerful body of a working peasant woman, barefoot on the rocks of the shore, hauling her mass of kelp on one shoulder as the waves crash in behind her. Guillou makes much of material contrasts between the whites of her shirt, coiffe and skin against the reddish brown of the seaweed, her skirt and the bit of her hair, visible at the temple. 

 Like many  peasant pictures that bring together the bodies of working women and other "filthy" natural things (like manure or the bodies of animals) Guillou's composition places and naturalizes the body of the harvester in the landscape, attaching its dirty labors to the year’s seasons and attesting to the peasant culture of recuperation.  From the 1860s until well after the first world war, painters repeatedly represented Breton women gathering and burning seaweed.  

Paul Gauguin's 1889 painting is perhaps the best-known version of the genre (I only recently encountered the 1890 Kelp Gatherers below):

Paul Gauguin, The Seaweed Gatherers, 1889.
Museum Folkwang, Essen

Paul Gauguin, Kelp Gatherers, 1890.  Private Collection.

In a letter of 1889 to Vincent Van Gogh, Gauguin writes

What I myself have done most of all this year are simple peasant children,  walking indifferently beside the sea with their cows. But because I don’t like the trompe l’oeil of the outdoors and of whatever else, I try to put into these desolate figures the savagery that I see in them, and that’s in me too. Here in Brittany the peasants have a medieval look about them and don’t appear to think for a moment that Paris exists and that we’re in the year 1889 – quite the opposite of the south. Here everything is rough like the Breton language, very closed-in (for evermore, it seems). The costumes are also almost symbolic, influenced by the superstitions of Catholicism. Look at the back, bodice a cross, the head wrapped in a black kerchief like nuns – in addition the figures are almost Asiatic, yellow and triangular, severe.
What the devil, I want to consult nature too, but I don’t want to take from it what I see there and what comes into my mind. The rocks, the costumes are black and yellow; I can’t put them down as blond and coquettish, can I? Still fearful of Our Lord and the priest, the Breton men hold their hats and all their utensils as if they were in a church; I also paint them in that state and not with a southern verve. At the moment I’m doing a no. 50 canvas, of women gathering wrack at the sea’s edge. They’re like boxes stacked up here and there, blue clothing and black coifs  and this despite the bitterness of the cold. Manure which they gather to fertilize their land, red-brown ochre with ruddy highlights. Pink sands, not yellow, because of the damp probably – dark sea. Seeing this every day I get a kind of gust of wind for life, of sadness and obedience to unfortunate laws. I try to put this gust of wind on canvas, not haphazardly but rationally, perhaps exaggerating a certain rigidity of pose, certain sombre colours etc... All of this is mannered perhaps, but where’s the natural in a painting? 

Émile Bernard, Breton Women with Seaweed, 1892.

The red wrack: "where's the natural?".... 

Gauguin, Sérusier, Bernard and many more repeat the association of Breton peasant women and their iron-red mounds of seaweed.

 An early 20th century painting from the collection in Pont Aven looks almost fauvist in its color range:

André Jolly,  Les Goemoniers  oil on canvas 1908. 

But the red of André Jolly's painting is no exaggeration.  I shot this red pool at the same beach-- the Pointe du Ragunez--  near Pont Aven in 2006.

    

I was stunned to see these Matisse paintings from the 1920s at a show in New York in 2013. Dead fish-- perhaps recently caught and landed on the beach-- are spread out on a matt of seaweed, three times over. With the famous cliffs of Etretat (Normandy) in the background (recalling Monet and Courbet and many others), Matisse makes slimy natures mortes, still life groupings in a landscape, absent the labor of fishing and gathering, absent the tourists, sea-bathers and fish-buyers. As if the sea spit this out upon the strand.


 By contrast, Elodie La Villette (1842-1917), and her sister, Caroline Espinet (1844-1910), were painters committed to depicting the entwined human and natural ecologies of the coast.  La Villette lived most of her life in Portivy, on the Quiberon peninsula, in Morbihan. These paintings draw no hard distinctions between the life of those on the shore and on the water.  La Villette often includes those figures who work the low tide, gathering shellfish and seaweed at its ebb.

Elodie La Villette, Larmor-Plage (near L’Orient) 1879

 

Elodie La Villette, Low Tide, Dieppe (Normandy), 1885

Elodie La Villette,  Low Tide at Portivy

Low tide at Portivy, June 2013

La Villette knew Corot and Jules Breton in Brittany. But unlike Breton's very sanitized and classical laundresses that I wrote about in the post on lavoirs, La Villette was much more interested in showing all sorts of labor on the coast.

Seaweed grows especially well on the rocky coast of southern Finistère.  This chart depicts the zones for various types along the wide littoral zone (the tidal range in Brittany is greater than elsewhere in Europe). As Rachel Carson noted in The Edge of The Sea:


Only the most hardy and adaptable can survive in a region so mutable, yet the area between the tide lines is crowded with plants and animals. In this difficult world of the shore, life displays its enormous toughness and vitality by occupying almost every conceivable niche. Visibly, it carpets the intertidal rocks; or half hidden, it descends into fissures and crevices, or hides under boulders, or lurks in the wet gloom of sea caves. Invisibly, where the casual observer would say there is no life, it lies deep in the sand, in burrows and tubes and passageways. It tunnels into solid rock and bores into peat and clay. It encrusts weeds or drifting spars or the hard, chitinous shell of a lobster. It exists minutely, as the film of bacteria that spreads over a rock surface or a wharf piling; as spheres of protozoa, small as pinpricks, sparkling at the surface of the sea; as Lilliputian beings swimming through dark pools that lie between the grains of sand.

 

 

Maturin Méheut (1882-1958), a prolific and talented painter, designer, ceramicist and illustrator was born in Lamballe, Brittany, and became one of the best known graphic artists of the early 20th century. 

In his early years, he collaborated with marine biologists in Roscoff to produce a book (Etude de la mer, flore et faune de la Manche et de l’Océan).  This along with 450 other works were exhibited at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1913.  These images come from a very positive review of this exhibition in the journal L’Illustration (20 Dec. 1913).  A century later at the Musée de la Marine, a huge survey of his work was presented.

As in Méheut's work, this underwater botanical illustration makes much of the vitality of living seaweed, while also creating vibrant, decorative harmonies.

Looking down on flattened seaweed at low tide, Portivy, Brittany, June 2013 
William Morris, Seaweed pattern.

One of William Morris's well-known floral patterns comes from seaweed forms.  I am comparing it to a photograph that I took in Portivy, looking down at the wealth of pattern flattened on the sand-- waiting for the tide to return and animate it to three dimensions. With the tide out, the forms are deflated, collapsed into scribbles; buoyed by the sea, their whips and arabesques return. The photo below was taken in 2008, right after swimming from the rocky beach on the Isle de Sein.

In Brittany, popular illustration and later photographic postcards repeat same the scenarios of harvesting, transporting, burning and selling the seaweed ash that intrigued the painters. The ash was sold to traveling buyers, who tested it for its iodine content.  Kelp has the highest level of iodine and was thus the most sought after plant. Iodine was used in glass and other industrial products. Before it could be chemically synthesized, seaweed provided the best source.

And in Ireland, J. M. Synge, who had studied ethnography with Le Braz in Brittany, described Kelp Gatherers on the shore:

It is a remarkable feature of the domestic finance of this district that, although the people are so poor, they are used to dealing with fairly large sums of money. Thus four or five tons of kelp well sold may bring a family between twenty and thirty pounds, and their bills for flour (which is bought in bags of two hundredweight at a good deal over a pound a bag) must also be considerable. It is the same with their pig-farming, fishing, and other industries, and probably this familiarity with considerable sums causes a part, at least, of the sense of shame that is shown by those who are reduced to working on the roadside for the miserable pittance of a shilling a day.

-- J. M. Synge, Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara (1910)

And these mythic, heroic figures appear again in the wonderfully bombastic Man of Aran in 1934.














Read Seaweed, part 2.