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Introduction
This exhibition reveals connections between artworks featured in Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism and paintings made in Tennessee between the 1870s and 1920s. In this period, there were few art schools or museums in Tennessee. Artists frequently traveled abroad to study at professional academies and see examples of old master and academic art as well as newer trends such as Impressionism. Many returned home to establish studios, teach classes, and form artist leagues, becoming leading cultural figures in their communities.
Focusing on rural experiences and food, works in this exhibition reflect the ideology of Agrarianism, which held that, as literary critic M. Thomas Inge wrote, “the life of the farmer is harmonious, orderly, and whole, and it counteracts the tendencies toward abstraction, fragmentation, and alienation that have come with modern urban experience.” Inge was writing about a 1920s group of Vanderbilt University faculty called the Fugitives, later renamed the Agrarians. These men argued that the South’s agricultural history could serve as a model for resisting the industrialization and urbanization occurring throughout the region at the time, which they considered dehumanizing. However, they did not acknowledge the dehumanizing impact of slavery and sharecropping in sustaining the region’s agrarian economy.
While the works in this exhibition largely predate the formation of the Nashville Fugitives, they align with the group’s concern that modernity was alienating people from the natural world. In making these artworks, artists like Lloyd Branson, George W. Chambers, and Willie Betty Newman emulated nineteenth-century European artists who depicted peasants with admiration for their strength, perseverance, and rootedness in the soil. In Europe and the United States, the ideology of Agrarianism contained a measure of nostalgia for times past, remembered or imagined. But for the artists in both exhibitions, the focus on farm labor is more than a sentimental expression. It celebrates a timeless foundation of human culture, fulfilling needs both physical and spiritual.
Gallery Descriptions
The Stalwart Farmworker
The depiction of farm laborers had been popular in European art since the early 1800s, when an interest in folk culture and rural life was gaining momentum among socially conscious artists. George W. Chambers, director of the Nashville School of Fine Arts, wrote in 1886:
The greatest living painters of France and Holland . . . are today painting the lives and customs of the peasantry; and their noblest portrayals have been of matron and maiden peasants. . . . The work of France’s greatest modern masters . . . has been to represent the simplicity, the poverty and the deep tragedy of peasant life, and especially the part woman plays in it.
We may imagine American artists of the time asking, Is there an American equivalent of the peasant? In both In the Chambers’s Tennessee Mountains and Lloyd Branson’s Women at Work, the answer is embodied in depictions of sturdy white female farmworkers, which show, in Chambers’s words, “resolute courage, simple faith, and heroic suffering worthy of dignified expression.”
Food Still Life Paintings
These depictions of humble fare speak to the food that ordinary Tennesseans might bring home from the market or grow in their own farms or gardens. They show a Realist penchant for directness, with no frills or flourishes standing in the way of their honest representations of what is actually there to eat.
Photographing Tennessee Farmers and Food Workers
The paintings in this exhibition romanticize farm work as a symbol of self-reliance, the bountiful land, and harmony with nature and tradition. They do not acknowledge the realities of such labor, including often-harsh working conditions—especially for sharecroppers, whose work primarily benefited landowners—and the increasing use of mechanization to replace human laborers. They also fail to represent the contributions of Black Tennesseans in all aspects of food production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in terms of the ingredients and recipes that are essential to American cuisine. Images in this presentation are intended to provide a more balanced picture of the period.