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work of the month

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La Desserte, (The Remains of the Meal), 1876
Etienne-Prosper Berne-Bellecour, French (1838-1910)
Oil on Canvas
Museum Purchase with funds from the Accessions Fund, Sheldon L. Breitbart Fund, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., Art Purchase Fund, and Grover Cleveland Outland Memorial Fund 2000.24

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WHAT DO EVERYDAY OBJECTS SAY?

If an artist walked into your home immediately after a dinner party you hosted for good friends and important people of your community, what would your table say about you? The position of your family within your community? How much you know of the world? The class with which you identify?

The still life tradition in the fine arts, which occupied a lowly position in the hierarchy of the painting genres (such as history painting, portraiture, landscape) in many official circles, has long provided artists an opportunity to explore the class dimensions of those who use the inanimate objects that are the subject of still life, while showing off the dazzling technical feats the artist has mastered.

In this very large, 4 x 6 feet example of the genre by late 19th-century French painter Etienne-Prosper Berne-Bellecour, what clues are evident about the people who are absent from the painting, and the host who brought them together at table? What do the objects say?

Your first clue is to identify what course of the meal is our subject. Consider the objects prominently displayed: fruit, biscuits, a Rococo silver coffee pot, a silver sugar bowl, a creamer, demitasse cups, glass decanters. Would you say this is the beginning of the meal, the main course, or the end of the meal? What clues do you find in the title of the work? Is this the table of a wealthy host, a modest host, or a host who might be thought middle class? Do you think the meal took place in the primary residence of the host? Or, is this the table of one removed from home who seeks to bring the trappings of a gentile lifestyle to an outpost? What answers can be unearthed by your eye and the artist's selections? What do the objects say? Consider these questions and the visual clues before you read further.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Though he began his career painting portraits and landscapes, Berne-Bellecour eventually focussed on military subjects, painting battle scenes and vignettes of enlisted life in a precise realist style. He enlisted in the regiment known as the Franc-Tireurs, or snipers of the Seine, during the Franco-Prussian War and continued to engage the French public's fascination for things exotic or Orientalist beyond the conclusion of the war in 1871 and throughout the decade of the 1870s. Chrysler Museum Chief Curator, Jeff Harrison, has noted "many of Berne-Bellecour's clients were high ranking French army officers; perhaps the commissioner might have been the same sort of client."

Etienne-Prosper Berne-Bellecour completed this major work in 1876. It embodies a pun, or play on words, in its title "La Desserte," a term which cleverly alludes to both the subject of the painting and the moment shown -- for though "La Desserte" sounds like the French word for after-dinner course, le dessert, it actually translates to mean "the remains of the meal." What Berne-Bellecour offered his Parisian audience with this play on words was an abandoned dessert table -- literally a "deserted dessert" the guests finished and withdrawn, and the objects left in splendid isolation, in a kind of timeless repose.

SITUATING BERNE-BELLECOUR WITHIN THE STILL LIFE TRADITION

Berne-Bellecour has included an exotic delicacy in his work: ". . .prominently displayed at the center of the table are several pieces of Turkish delight, a nougat-like candy that was cut into cubes and dusted with sugar that was a traditional Ottoman after-dinner dessert. It was considered a delicacy in nineteenth-century western Europe; and its inclusion in the painting is consciously meant to demonstrate the host's sophistication and refinement for things exotic and Near Eastern. . ."

Dessert and confectionery still lifes also figure prominently in the 17th-century Dutch still life tradition where sugar and its by-products for desserts are both exotic and an allusion to the wealth and sophistication of a host: "In the culinary culture of the aristocracy and the patrician middle classes, banquets consisted of six to eight -- sometimes even nine-courses and were always concluded by a dessert. Interests in desserts came to a climax at a time when numerous delicacies had been introduced as new luxuries. This was especially true for sugar confectionery, which appeared in still lifes around 1600 for the first time. The introduction of sugar marked a radical revolution of taste. Initially it was only used for pharmaceutical purposes, but it soon replaced honey as a sweetener and a food. Sugar was only grown in tropical areas, at first in the East Indies, but then also in Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries and finally also Brazil, where it was farmed on large plantations for export to Europe." Berne-Bellecour's sophistication as an artist looking to models from the past and to his moment's tastes for the worldliness of the exotic are both realized in this magnificent work. In a single artistic flourish of light plays, realism, and late nineteenth-century domestic adornment, the artist has signaled the gentility of his commissioner, the taste of the French upper-classes at table, and his very own ability to depict inanimate objects of everyday life in what was by then a most venerable artistic tradition.

LOOKING FURTHER

If you had the time to linger longer with this single work on your visit to the museum, would the objects in the work, your eyes, and the artist's mastery tell you the story that this didactic written piece entails?

Challenge your perceptions by visiting another work in the Chrysler Museum galleries (or website) and letting your eyes do all the work that they can. Then match your own discoveries to those provided by written interpretations accompanying the works of art. Have fun!

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ORGANIZING A LARGE BANQUET IN THE FRENCH STYLE

(Ask yourself, does the dessert course in Berne-Bellecour's painting allude to the sumptuousness of courses that may have preceded it in the traditional French style of banquets?)

For a company of thirty distinguished persons who are to be served on a grand scale, a table is needed with as many places and serviettes as there are persons, and each plate the same width as a chair. . ."

First Course "To begin with 30 bowls are served, containing nothing but soup dishes with minced meat on slices of bread. Fifteen of these bowls are to be filled with meat, and in the other fifteen the minced meat is to be placed on bread..."
Second Course "This consists of all manner of dishes, such as venison fried briefly in stock, and also pies, both common ones and those made with puff pastry, snails, tongue, cold meat, sausages, black sausage, melons and fruit, depending on the season, and various small salads and herbs, that can be placed on the saltcellars and the table rings in the middle of the table..."
Third Course "This consists of all manner of big roasts, such as partridges, pheasants, quail, wild or wood doves, young chickens, young hares, whole lambs and suchlike..."
Fourth Course "This consists of all manner of small roasts, such as water quail, fieldfares, larks, and suchlike..."
Fifth Course "If fish cooked with ham are served, then the salmon, trout, carp and pike are to be served whole, alongside any pies that are also made from fish..."
Sixth Course "This consists of all manner of dishes made from butter and ham as well as various kinds of eggs, of which several are mixed with mutton gravy, others fried in pans, others again mixed with sugar..."
Seventh Course " This consists of all manner of fruit, as permitted by the season, as well as cream and cakes. Almonds and walnuts without their shells are placed on the saltcellars and table rings."
Eighth Course "The final course of the banquet consists of all manner of preserves, marzipan both moist and dry, jams and confectionery. Decorated with different kinds of coloured sugar and spiked with little toothpicks, sticks of fennel are to be placed on top of the saltcellars and table rings, as well as several bowls of musk cakes and other ambergris and musk-scented sweets"

(How do you think the traditional French banquet table of the seventeenth century may have been adapted by military officers serving a civilized meal in the field, rather than at home, in the later nineteenth century?)

-- John S. Welch

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Presentation by Chrysler Museum of Art Chief Curator, Dr. Jefferson C. Harrison to Chrysler Museum of Art Acquisition Committee, November 30, 2000.

Norbert Schneider. The Art of Still Life. Taschen, 1990.

Charles Sterling. Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century. Harper & Row, 2nd ed., 1981.

Photographs of this delicious repast are the work of Scott Wolff and are courtesy of the Moses Myers House.