Cincinnati Exhibition Explores Why These Late 1800s French Artists Focused on Food

Have you ever questioned where the food on your table comes from? Over 150 years ago, French artists wondered the same thing. “Farm to Table: Food and Identity in the Age of Impressionism,” a new exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum, collects more than 60 paintings and sculptures from late 1800s France. The show explores ties between food, national identity and art and runs June 13 through Sept. 21.

Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War n 1871, the Prussian siege of Paris cut off the city’s food supply, leading to a brutal winter filled with starvation and hardship that resulted in political and social upheaval, including brief rule by the Paris Commune, a revolutionary socialist government. 

“What you have is a France that is very much questioning who and what it means to be French,” says Peter Bell, Curator of European Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum. “They thought they were the dominant culture and dominant country in Europe up to that point.”

As a part of rebuilding that fractured identity, Bell says artists depicted food production and consumption, a historical point of pride for French culture. Images of farm workers, like the portraits of Julien Dupré, acquired heroic qualities.

“They’re part of this national identity, the story of how the strength of France comes from the countryside and the agricultural products that go into making the great baguettes and brioches that everyone enjoys in the cities,” Bell says. 

Julien Dupré’s ”Haying Scene” (courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum; Gift of Justina G. Catlin in memory of her husband, Daniel Catlin, 25:1917)

At the same time, country and city met in real life, too. Due to postwar population influx into Paris, the city expanded rapidly, causing metropolitan and agricultural spaces — and the people within them — to converge. Victor Gilbert’s paintings of Paris’s Les Halles marketplace show the fruits of that process. 

“[Gilbert is] really delighting in depicting this abundance of produce,” Bell says. “All the different segments of society coming together and interacting around them. There's this woman in a fur stole talking to someone who was probably a serving woman in a restaurant or a kitchen as they're choosing their cuts of fish.”

Fittingly, the exhibition is divided into two gallery spaces representing production and consumption. On the production side, visitors can find images of labor and land, from Rosa Bonheur’s evocative paintings of livestock and fields to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s bronze statue of a female winkle-picker, otherwise known as a snail harvester. Meanwhile, other works juxtapose dining practices throughout the period, with images of rat butchering during the siege of Paris, displayed one room over from paintings of sumptuous feasts held just 15 years later.

“Artists can be some of the most eloquent critics of social systems,” Bell says.

The exhibition weaves together the politics of creating both art and food. A painting by James Tissot shows the Paris Salon, France’s prestigious annual state-sponsored exhibition. On “vernissage,” or varnishing day, the day before the Salon opened, the accepted artists put a last layer of varnish on their paintings and attended a lavish banquet held by the state. Tissot depicts artists at the feast, including legendary sculptor Auguste Rodin, dressed up and sitting with their wives. 

Vincent van Gogh’s “Vineyards at Auvers” (courtesy of Saint Louis Art Museum; Funds given by Mrs. Mark C. Steinberg, 8:1953)

Other artists took a defiant approach. The show features a still life created in prison as an act of protest from Gustave Courbet, a realist painter imprisoned by the French state for his part in the Paris Commune. Visitors can also see works from impressionists like Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet that were largely excluded from the Paris Salon. These paintings used abstraction and stylization to capture the feeling of their subjects, rather than perfect replication.

“With such a universal theme like [food], my hope is that it makes it easier for the visitor to take themselves back into that moment in time and think about the conditions around the artists, around the subjects in the paintings,” Bell says.

Bell describes the exhibition’s time period as, in many ways, the beginning of modernity.

“When we look at one of the paintings of two people having dinner at a cafe, it looks like what we do now,” Bell says. 

For more information about “Farm to Table: Food and Identity in the Age of Impressionism,” visit cincinnatiartmuseum.org.

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