Farm to Table title graphic

Introduction

Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism explores intersections of art, gastronomy, and national identity in late nineteenth-century France. With its reputation for refinement, fortitude, and ingenuity, France’s stature as the world’s culinary capital was a point of national pride. But it also veiled—and at times amplified—fractures in French society arising from the privation of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and the subsequent period of political instability, colonialist expansion, and increased opposition to class inequities.

Spanning the age of Impressionism, the exhibition’s nearly sixty works depict luxurious meals and humble fare, bountiful harvests and agrarian crises. Scenes of markets and gardens, farmers, chefs, and restaurants attest to evolving norms of gender and class and the tenuous relationship between Paris and the provinces. Throughout the exhibition, visitors will see how food’s impact on individuals, families, and communities informed the changing social identities of a people who had long been told that what they ate—and how they ate it—defined who they were.


Gallery Descriptions

On the Farm

Works in this section portray both the realities and idealization of farming and husbandry, from the fields of rural France and the kitchen gardens of the country’s urban centers to the lands of France’s colonial empire. Many of these works draw attention to the distinctive qualities of the French terroir—the soil, which was believed to lend an intrinsic and ineffable “Frenchness” to the nation’s gastronomy. Auguste Renoir’s scene of banana trees in the French colony of Algeria, however, poses another question: If France’s colonies were thought of as extensions of the nation, what place do the products of their soil have within French cuisine?

To the Market

The process of harvesting, transporting, and selling food from farms and the sea to buyers at markets comprises the economic heart of culinary exchange. Markets brought individuals from across social, economic, geographic, and culinary strata together amid piles of fruits and vegetables, fish, dairy, and meat. For many artists, the market offered an opportunity to show everyday experience in varied vignettes. These could be romanticized genre scenes but could also probe anxieties around class norms and fears about health and hygiene.

While markets were found across the country, Les Halles—Paris’s central markets—were the most significant in the French consciousness. Constructed in the 1860s in a central Paris neighborhood long associated with vice, Les Halles were the most overt symbol of the capital’s position as the center of the French culinary universe. With its regular patterns of vertical supports and arched portals, Les Halles’ interior space provided a sense of order amid the teeming energy at the vendor tables, reinforcing the markets’ role as a stabilizing force in the culinary and social ecosystem.

Food Still Lifes

Still lifes of food often contained hidden social messages. Gustave Courbet’s austere 1872 depiction of fruit, for example, seems to be politically neutral. But painted around the time he was jailed for activities on behalf of the Paris Commune—a radical movement that fought social and governmental conservatism and corruption—the work’s unidealized rendering of fruit was associated with the humble and unpretentious qualities of the working class.

In other paintings, cuts of meat act as stand-ins for the body, serving as allusions to both revolutionary violence and medical research. Plates of luxurious pastries reflected not only the impact of the colonial sugar trade but also the ingenuity of French food scientists and the aesthetics of presentation.

Food Workers

Artists often focused on the laborers whose efforts transformed—or transferred—food from the farm or market to the table. Whether in paintings of young cooks or female servers, these paintings highlight the impact of the food economy on the revolution in gender and class norms in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

At the Table

Questions of family, community, citizenship, and spectacle came to the fore as artists in the age of Impressionism focused on the dining experience. They took on subjects ranging from dates at fashionable Parisian restaurants to the diverse practices of quiet family meals across the empire, to the meager fare of the poor and those impacted by wartime food shortages. In doing so, they examined not only the culture of consumption across the economic spectrum, but also customs, manners, and mores associated with dining together, both in public and private settings.


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