Sir George Clausen (1852–1944), A Frosty March Morning (1904), oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by C.N. Luxmoore 1929), London. Photographic Rights © Tate 2016, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/clausen-a-frosty-march-morning-n04485
Van Gogh’s Salad Days
What was this? TV comedy character Mr. Bill? No, it was part of last week’s The Other Van Gogh Exhibit: Van Gogh’s “Self-Portrait as an Artist” rendered in squash, red cabbage, dried bananas and jicama, at Eagle Rock Gifted Magnet School.
The seventh-grade classes at the school had been studying a unit on Van Gogh and even made a trip to the Van Gogh exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. So it wasn’t very far-fetched for teacher Sara Leiber McKinney to assign the them to reproduce Van Gogh paintings in the form of salads. Since this was a school project, it had an improving slogan: “Van Gogh and Vegetables: Five a Day–That’s the Way!”
The students chose up teams, as for a playground sport at recess, and each picked a Van Gogh painting. McKinney provided color photocopies of the paintings on which they arranged the vegetables. “Like the Rose Parade,” she points out.
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“I told them, ‘I want you to be able to pronounce the name of your painting,’ ” McKinney says. “So their hands shot up–they all wanted to do ‘Wheat Field With Crows.’ ” In fact, both the Period 3 and Period 4 class produced their own “Wheat Field With Crows.”
The vegetable artists often had a problem getting the visual texture right, though “Garden With Flowers” did capture Van Gogh’s anxious sketchiness.
But the biggest challenge was color. “There aren’t that many blue vegetables,” observed Hana van der Ster with regret. Her team had tackled “The Plain of Auvers.”
For red, peppers were an obvious choice, and the students who rendered “Vase With Poppies, Daisies, Cornflower, Peonies and Chrysanthemums” cleverly used radish skins for the poppies. For yellow–fortunately, one of Van Gogh’s favorite colors–students had yellow peppers and up to three squashes to work with. The version of “Hospital Corridor at St. Remy” was particularly brilliant (the little man standing in the hall was a slice of wood ear mushroom).
And green obviously offered great scope. “Cypress” had impressively roiling leaves of fresh dill, not to mention some disturbing bean sprout clouds in the sky. Students could use olives for black and jicama or potato for white.
But for blue, they had to make do with red cabbage, blueberries or eggplant skin. One team suggested rosemary flowers, but McKinney nixed it: “I told them I wanted it to be edible, and not that many people eat rosemary flowers, or raw potato skins. But they didn’t entirely comply.”
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In fact, most of Period 3’s paintings used raw potatoes in one form or another, to particular effect in “Sheaves of Wheat.” On the other hand, Van Gogh might not have objected, since his first great painting was “The Potato Eaters.”
FS Color Series: Zenith inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s Fields of Gold
March 7, 2019 by Rosie Lesso 10408 2
Sunflowers / Vincent van Gogh / January 1889 / oil on canvas
The warm yellow hue of Zenith linen recalls the radiant, sun-baked wheat fields of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, where golden sunlight shimmers across the canvas and burns a hole in the sky. Yellow was a color of great personal significance to van Gogh, particularly towards the end of his life, when he flooded his canvases with the rich Mediterranean light of the French Arles countryside he came to call home. Artist Paul Gauguin later reflected on the work of his close friend, writing, “Oh yes, he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland – those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.” His paintings of still life subjects, self-portraits, street scenes and expansive fields showing reapers toiling under the hot sun reveal his ongoing passion for a unifying yellow tone, which could not only portray the light and lifestyle of the place he chose to live, but express the artist’s own inner emotional world.
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Van Gogh’s love affair with color began when he moved from his native Holland to Paris in 1886, where he encountered the vibrant new work of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. The sombre, dark colors of his earlier Dutch paintings were abandoned in favour of vivid, exaggerated hues that created an expressive, personalised vision of the world. Van Gogh was also deeply intrigued by popular color theories of the time, exploring his own range of complimentary and contrasting hues, discovering a natural flair for creating color relationships. The monochromatic still life painting Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes, 1887, was painted almost entirely with yellow hues, offset with small patches of green, red, pink and a complimentary blue to make the yellow stand out. Such striking use of yellows was made possible by a wider range of recently developed pigments, demonstrating a new, spectacular sense of vibrancy.
Quinces, Lemons, Pears and Grapes / Vincent van Gogh / 1887 / oil on canvas
In 1888 van Gogh abandoned Paris for the simple life, moving to Arles in the South of France, where he felt a new sense of belonging and began his most prolific period of painting. It was here that he developed the signature yellow paintings that would come to define his career. Flickering, monochrome fields of golden light in paintings such as The Harvest, 1888 reveal a deep connection to the rural, peasant life, where van Gogh found, “…golden tones of every hue: green gold, yellow gold, pink gold, bronze or copper coloured gold, and even from the yellow of lemons to the matte, lusterless yellow of threshed grain.”
The Bedroom / Vincent van Gogh / 1888 / oil on canvas
In Arles van Gogh rented a studio in the right wing of 2 Place Lamartine, which he captured in one of his most celebrated paintings, The Yellow House, 1888, lit by a glowing sunset against a deep blue evening sky. His colors increasingly took on symbolic content, with the yellow here expressing an ease and contentment with his newfound home. At the Yellow House van Gogh invited his close friend, the painter Paul Gauguin to stay, hoping they could share living and working spaces, painting side by side. In anticipation for Gauguin’s visit, van Gogh created a series of glorious sunflower paintings to decorate his friend’s room, featuring sprawling flowers and stems captured in a rich display of harmonious golden tones, which he described as a “symphony in yellow”. In The Bedroom, 1888, van Gogh portrayed the comforting space of his own bedroom with the same rich golden yellows, describing them in a letter to his brother Theo, “…the colour has to do the job here … and through its being simplified by giving a grander style to things, to be suggestive here of rest or of sleep in general.”
The Harvest / Vincent Van Gogh / 1888 / oil on canvas
Throughout the following years, van Gogh continued to paint with the same golden tones, increasingly focussing on painting outdoors. In capturing wheat fields in Arles, Saint- Remy and Auvers-sur-Oise as luminous, expansive scenes that flicker with iridescent yellow sunlight, he reveals the deep sense of belonging he felt amidst the French countryside, which would remain his home for the rest of his life.
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Other Gardens: The Vegetable Patch on Canvas
Sir George Clausen (1852–1944), A Frosty March Morning (1904), oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cm, The Tate Gallery (Presented by C.N. Luxmoore 1929), London. Photographic Rights © Tate 2016, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/clausen-a-frosty-march-morning-n04485
Flower gardens have long been favourite motifs for painters. Long before the Impressionists, artists have painted flowers for their exuberant colour and varied textures. But flower gardens have, over much of that time, been the preserve of the rich. Rural cottages might have fronted a display of semi-wild flowers, but the serious garden has been devoted primarily to vegetables, which pass through the kitchen and onto the table to feed the family.
This article looks at some paintings of vegetable gardens: far less glamorous, occasionally quite exotic, and essential to survival.
Vegetables have, of course, been frequently included in still life paintings. Some of Chardin’s appear to explain how to make a good vegetable soup, for instance.
Among his many flower paintings, Charles Demuth also painted fruit and vegetables, of which the Eggplant (c 1922-23), or aubergine, was a clear favourite. As with asparagus, another favourite in still life paintings, few families sit down to enjoy such special vegetables.
Several artists have had peccadillos for particular vegetables: for Carlo Crivelli, it was cucumbers, with which he decorated his many otherwise fairly conventional paintings of the Virgin and Child. There have been plenty, though, who have made successful motifs from the vegetable garden, most particularly during the nineteenth century.
Sisley’s fog-cloaked flowerbed in the foreground is a small patch of colour in this garden. The woman working away is not tending her nasturtiums, but toiling away at what will, in a few months time, be carefully prepared and cooked in her kitchen.
George Clausen’s gardeners are preparing the soil on a frosty morning in March. As they live in a town, they have to work surrogate plots in allotments, small portions of land unsuitable for dwellings, or (in this case) divided from fields at the edge of the town. For many living in towns and cities, a trip to the family allotment was the closest they would get to going to the country – a brief retreat to escape the concrete and tarmac, and dream of living in more pastoral places. Even small allotments were often decisive to a family’s food supply.
Whereas Clausen enjoyed his gardening, for Gustave Caillebotte it became his life, an obsession. He painted the large vegetable gardens which fed the estates of the rich, as in The Gardeners (1875).
In 1888, when he moved out to his modest estate at Petit-Gennevilliers near Argenteuil, Caillebotte almost stopped painting to free up time for The Kitchen Garden, Petit Gennevilliers (1882), as well as his flowers and other garden landscapes.
Back in the more everyday, Emil Jakob Schindler shows a more typical rural Vegetable garden in Plankenberg in September (1885).
In the more extreme climates of the Nordic countries, vegetable gardens remained essential to nutrition and life. Nikolai Astrup shows a couple probably sowing their small patch in western Norway on A Night in Spring (1909).
Then late in the summer, they come to harvest that most unglamorous of crops, Rhubarb (1911).
Lovis Corinth found a vegetable garden beside Walchensee, up in the Bavarian Alps, which he painted in 1924, just a year before his death.
The production of vegetables was also more organised across villages and small communities, which used larger areas and fields to grow sufficient to subsist, and maybe even a surplus to barter or sell.
Asai Chū’s Spring Ridge 春畝 浅井忠筆 (1889) shows a gang at work in a field at the start of the growing season. For staple root-crops, such as potatoes, this practice was widespread, and a popular subject for social realist artists in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Most of those left in the country were condemned to working from dawn to dusk in a back-breaking effort to save themselves from starvation. Jean-François Millet and others showed this more accurate picture in Potato Planters (c 1861).
What was sown or planted then has to be harvested, as in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s October: Potato Gatherers (1878). Although there are still smiles, those potatoes were all that kept those families from starvation through the coming winter.
Vincent van Gogh painted Woman Lifting Potatoes (1885) and similar scenes during his time in Nuenen, in North Brabant.
János Pentelei Molnár’s The Potato Harvest (1901) takes this on into the early years of the twentieth century, in Hungary.
Across Europe, different crops brought similar scenes: here is Émile Claus’s The Beet Harvest (1890) in Belgium.
Leon Wyczółkowski’s Beetroot Digging II (1911) shows a similar scene in Poland, before the First World War.
If the flower garden was the place for social gatherings and relationships, more everyday events occurred among the cabbages.
Jean-François Millet’s First Steps (c 1858) shows one of the early milestones in a child’s life, as an infant is about to break free from mother’s arms and walk for the first time towards their father’s.
The vegetable garden is also where we learn much about life – about the birds and the bees, of cabbages and kings. Aimé Perret captures this beautifully in her The Lettuce Patch (1893).
The vegetables which are surplus can also be sold on at a market. There are many paintings of conventional European markets, but none is a match for Christian Henri Roullier’s The Vegetable Souk, from the early twentieth century.
No article about vegetables and paintings can conclude without at least one of Arcimboldo’s unique portraits.
This is perhaps his most famous, but he also made a painting which is even more relevant to this article: The Vegetable Gardener (1587-90).
Which all goes to show that we are what we eat.
