Ingredients In Still Life: The Tables Of Peale And Meléndez

How Does A Vegetable Become The Main Subject?

In a kitchen, ingredients belong to the food being prepared. In a still life, they are placed before a viewer. A cabbage’s folds, the sheen of an aubergine and the colour exposed by an opened fruit can organise the whole picture. Here we follow still life through the relationships among its visible objects.

James Peale’s Still Life: Balsam Apple and Vegetables provides a vivid starting point. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates this oil painting to about the 1820s and records it under accession 39.52. Its account identifies the vegetables individually, bringing the forms we see together with names familiar from the kitchen.

Surface And Light In James Peale’s Vegetables

Peale brings the vegetables close together on a pale surface. Large green leaves rise behind them, while tomatoes in the foreground form smaller, bright accents. The smooth, dark aubergine in the middle stands apart from the crinkled leaves beside it. We can follow how the same light appears differently across these contrasting surfaces.

The museum identifies okra, blue-green cabbage, Savoy cabbage, Hubbard squash, aubergine, balsam apple, tomatoes and purple-red cabbage. The opened yellow skin and red seeds of the fruit identified as balsam apple form a distinct focus within the composition. As the ingredients acquire names, different plants become recognisable within similar colours.

A Cut Surface Opens Another View

Two details invite a closer look: the exposed inside of the cabbage at the left and the opened fruit in front. One reveals compressed leaves; the other reveals an inner cavity and red seeds. The outline of a whole object meets the arrangement concealed within it. This is a reading of the composition proposed from the visible painting.

In a botanical portrait, a section can explain a particular structure. In Peale’s picture it also participates in colour and openness: outer green meets pale inner layers, while yellow skin sits against red seeds. A view can convey something about an ingredient while establishing a visual rhythm. Following these relationships moves our attention from the name of an ingredient to the arrangement of the whole.

• Follow plant structures through historical botanical portraits

An Outdoor Meal Opens Onto A Landscape

The scale changes in Luis Meléndez’s The Afternoon Meal, or La Merienda, dated about 1772. Fruit, bread and vessels occupy the foreground of an outdoor landscape. Grapes rise above an opened melon; a white cloth draped over a basket sits beside rounded loaves. Distance at the left makes the objects in front seem particularly close.

The Met connects the picnic basket with the painting’s traditional title and identifies its large format and landscape as exceptional features among Meléndez’s still lifes. The museum also interprets the local produce and traditional cookware as ennobling Spanish culture. In that historical reading, basket, cookware and produce together establish the cultural setting of an outdoor meal.

How Do These Arrangements Differ?

Placed side by side, Peale’s attention to surfaces and Meléndez’s opening onto a landscape show how culinary objects can create different experiences of looking. One gathers our attention around skins and leaves. The other extends a space from the stone foreground to the basket, the grapes and the distant sky.

The title of Meléndez’s 1774 painting in the Prado, Bodegón con pepinos, tomates y recipientes, also brings ingredients and containers together: cucumbers, tomatoes and vessels. The Prado identifies it as part of a series of forty-four canvases made for Prince Carlos. Their titles, arrangements and cultural settings approach ingredients through close surfaces, an outdoor meal and the company of vessels.

Returning From The Painting To The Table

These pictures allow the visual world of gastronomy to extend beyond a finished dish. Leaf, skin, vessel and fabric belong to it too. Knowing an ingredient can begin with learning its name, or with noticing which of its features becomes visible because of the object placed alongside it.

At a present-day table, we can look in the same way at a pepper’s glossy skin, the cavity revealed by a cut, and the glass of a hot-sauce bottle beside it. Attention given to surfaces in a painting now turns towards the relationship between an ingredient’s colour and a vessel’s form. This is a way of looking carried from the paintings to today’s table.

• Explore table objects within the experience of sharing
• Consider the difference between describing taste and making an aesthetic judgment

• A Shared Language for Red: From Pepper to Colour Chart