Frans Floris de Vriendt, Feast of the Gods, 1550, oil on panel.
When early seventeenth-century painters transformed the feast of the gods genre into contemporary ‘merry company’ scenes, replacing naked gods with well-dressed Dutch men and women in domesticated interiors, they retained the implied moral warnings about the consequences of pleasure. In Dirck Hals’s A Party at Table of 1625, for instance, a painting hanging on the wall behind the men and women feasting on oysters depicts the Expulsion from Paradise. The opulence of the company is emphasized by their dress and again by the discarded oyster-shells on the floor. Pleasure is transitory, the picture intones.
After 1660 in the Low Countries, paintings of people eating oysters grow more intimate. Now fewer men and women eat oysters in smaller domestic interiors, the parlour or the bedroom rather than in the dining room. Now there are at most three people eating, usually only two – a man and a woman. The light falls on the couple eating; they are framed more tightly within the composition. The ‘camera’ draws closer, lingering.
In Frans van Mieris’s Oyster Dinner (overleaf), for instance, the scene is significantly and intensely erotic: the woman’s jacket falls open to reveal flesh, and the oyster satin in which she is dressed falls loosely over her opened legs with a sheen like the mother-of-pearl of the oysters themselves,. She cups the oyster exquisitely in her hand, wine glass in the other, as the older man leans forward to whisper words to her. Behind them the bed curtains wait to be opened. What did the painted oyster offered in the bedroom say to its seventeenth-century viewers? It is difficult to say: that once opened perhaps, innocence is not to be closed again, or that pleasures are transitory?
In Jan Steen’s Young Girl Eating Oysters of 1658–60 (overleaf), the ‘camera’ draws closer yet. The woman oyster eater, sprinkling salt or pepper on her food, looks up at us alluringly, as if she knows the viewer desires her, and as if she has been caught in an illicit act for which she feels no shame. The oyster and its eater seem to be composed here for admiration’s sake, intimate, seductive – they appear to carry no moral censure. Yet in his Easy Come, Easy Go, (1661, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam) Steen used discarded oyster-shells alongside several other emblems in the painting to point a very explicit moral: in the back room two men are playing backgammon, the dog sniffs the lemon that will taste sour to his tongue, one painting depicts a shipwreck, another a statue of fortune standing on a die resting on a winged globe. Difficult not to follow this Protestant message: money, virtue, success are all easily acquired and easily lost. Spend wisely.
Frans van Mieris, Oyster Dinner, 1661, oil on wood.
Jan Steen, Young Girl Eating Oysters, c. 1658–60, oil on panel.
And then there are seventeenth-century paintings in which the ‘camera’ draws even closer, erasing all human presence, and these are even more difficult for the twenty-first century viewer to decode. ‘Breakfast-pieces’, or still-lifes of food, are unique to seventeenth-century north-west European art and were almost all produced by artists working in Antwerp, Frankfurt, Haarlem and Amsterdam between 1630 and 1700. Here the food objects are disconnected from human life. They seem to have found silence, to have shaken off their moral significance and to exist just for themselves, oysters for oysters’ sake, or at least for the sake of white flesh tones cupped in mother-of-pearl and in roughened, petticoated white; desirable.
Osias Beert (1570–1624), a Flemish painter who worked in Antwerp, was one of the greatest oyster still-life painters of the early seventeenth century, but we know frustratingly little about him or about why he began to paint breakfast-pieces. Only eight of his paintings have survived; several place the dish of oysters at centre stage. In his Bodegón (‘tavern scene’) in the Prado, Madrid, for instance, a fly sits on the loaf of fresh bread – its presence reminds us that the process of decomposition is held, but even now in this timelessness the fly has already begun to feed and lay its eggs, the opening oysters are already turning. Time passes, flesh decays. But paradoxically the oyster painter has stopped time, sealed it in paint, just as he asks us to contemplate time’s passing. In another Beert oyster piece, in the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, a flake of a pastry has fallen onto the foreground of the table, looking for all the world like a maggot. The oysters held in time, ‘still to be enjoy’d’, evoke lines from Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in which the poet contemplates an urn on which painted lovers pursue each other. Keats shows us how the lovers are immortalized in the act of love, but also held back by art from its consummation:
Osias Beert the Elder, Bodegón (Oysters and Glasses), c. 1610. oil on panel.
Osias Beert the Elder, Banquet Piece with Oysters, Fruit and Wine, c. 1610/20, oil on panel.
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Osias Beert was also an innovator in terms of form. Other early ‘breakfast-piece’ painters tended to take a higher viewpoint, grouping their objects simply in tiered rows. Instead Beert saw an opportunity for compositional experiments: glasses upright and upturned echo each other, the oval shapes of the oysters echo lemon ovals and those of nuts and olives.
Later in the seventeenth century, the Haarlem artists Pieter Claesz. (c. 1597–1661) and Willem Claesz. Heda (1594–1680) began to experiment with the genre, by lowering the viewpoint so that the eye rests on a level with the object, emphasizing outline against a stark background, as Beert had done. But unlike Beert, Claesz. and Heda toned down colour to experiment with monochromes (shades of grey, silver, brown-lilac, grey-whites), playing with different illuminative effects from clear daylight to artificial light and chiaroscuro. They moved their oysters around on the table in order to experiment with balance, weighting the objects in the space towards one side or the other and reducing the number of food objects so that we look more closely. Here, as in Beert’s work, time has been sealed – the table is in disarray, someone has begun to eat the food, but for a moment we have been asked to look and admire the beauty of the disarray.
These oyster paintings are enigmatic. They appear to be full of codes and yet are so difficult to read. And, of course, even the breakfast-pieces are not really still- lifes – nothing here is still. Action presses forward. Everything is moving, turning. But why are we asked to look at oysters – or for that matter, loaves, fishes, olives? In The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), Svetlana Alpers argues that the common practice of Dutch still-life painting is
Willem Claesz. Heda, Still-life with Oysters, Rum Glass and Silver Cup, 1634, oil on panel.
to reveal to our sight . . . Whether it is edibles such as cheese, a pie, herring, fruit or nuts, or collectibles such as shells, vessels, and watches, we are offered the inside, or underside as well as the outer view. Cheeses are cut into, pies spill out their fillings beneath the shelter of crust, herring are cut to reveal flesh as well as gleaming skins. Shells and vessels of precious metal or glasses topple on their sides . . . and watches are inevitably opened to reveal their works. Objects are exposed to the probing eye not only by the technique of flaying them, but also by reflection: the play of light on the surface distinguishes glass from metal, from cloth, from pastry, and also serves to multiply surfaces.2
These objects, she argues, demand that we look and discriminate between the identities of things. She links this invitation to look closely to the influence of Sir Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, published in 1605. Bacon argues:
Those, however, who aspire not to guess and divine, but to discover and know; who propose not to devise mimic and fabulous worlds of their own, but to examine and dissect the nature of the world itself; must go to facts for everything.3
But the breakfast-pieces did not enjoin the viewer to look closely at everything. The objects collected in a still-life
were particular because they were ordinary – familiar, everyday, and, in the words of the art historian Norman Bryson, therefore overlooked. In Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990) he writes:
Still life takes in the exploration of what “importance’ tramples underfoot . . . The human figure, with all of its fascination, is expelled. Narrative – the drama of greatness – is banished. And what is looked at overturns the standpoint on which human importance is established. Still life is unimpressed by the categories of achievement, grandeur and the unique.4
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Ray, 1728, oil on canvas.
There is drama here even in the most ordinary of objects, these painters seem to insist – in the play of light, in the range of tones and colours and in the structural and geometric relationships between the arranged objects.
In 1728 the young French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) painted an extraordinary composition called The Ray. Indebted to Dutch art in its attention to the overlooked, it nonetheless shows, on closer examination, an entirely different set of brushstrokes, loose, rugged and aggressive. It is a violent picture but also a kitchen scene, which like the work of the Dutch still-leven painters reminds us that nothing is ordinary and nothing stands still. This too tells us to look – to turn our gaze into a quiet familiar corner where something remarkable – and terrible – is happening. A cat, teeth bared, stalks oysters on a kitchen shelf; behind her a ray hangs suspended against stone by a hook, its flesh ruddy and bleeding, its ‘face’ grotesque and grimacing; a knife jags inwards into the picture space; a few inches away a dead fish juts towards us, it has died gasping for air. But in the midst of all this predatory violence, a heap of white linen invites our eyes to linger on the beauty of its folds.
Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life with a Glass and Oysters, c. 1640, oil on wood.
What Chardin and the earlier still-life painters in the Low Countries have in common is that they show us the drama of the commonplace, remind us to look in corners we had not perhaps noticed before, and then to look again. George Eliot would learn this in the mid-nineteenth century in her travels to northern Europe and in her contemplation of Dutch art. These quiet paintings also reminded her about something she already knew – the stories she wanted to tell were not of the extraordinary lives of great men and women, but of the commonplace men and women she had observed around her. These lives were to be looked at; they were like still-lifes, but never still. This was the drama of the overlooked.
Hannah Collins, Sex, No. 1, 1991, gelatin-silver print mounted on cotton.
Bianca Sforni, Oyster Portrait XI, from a series of twelve oyster portraits taken in 1993.
In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, the poet Mark Doty describes memory as working like a still-life painting: ‘a poetic field of objects arrayed against the dark, things somehow conjoined in a conspiracy of silence, some whispered communion between them, a dialogue we cannot hear’.5 Like Bolitho he tells of falling in love with oysters – painted oysters – in a still-life by the eighteenth-century Dutch painter Davidsz. de Heem, called Still-life with a Glass and Oysters. And he describes the desire that Osias Beert’s painted oyster flesh draws from him, a desire to turn them into words and to have these words – like the oysters themselves – on his tongue:
When it came to oysters, Osias Bert had no peer, I think. In the National Gallery of Art in Washington there is a platter of his oysters that seems the ultimate expression of light playing on the slightly viscous, pearly, opalescent, and convoluted flesh, its wetness distinguishing it from the similarly sheened but hard stuff of the shell’s interior. Their liquidity makes me want language to match, want on my tongue their deliquescence, their liquefaction.6
The peeled lemons and the oysters in de Heem’s painting are intimate, as if undressed, he writes: ‘they are, in a way, nudes, always in dishabille, partly undraped, the rind peeled away to allow our gaze further pleasure – to see the surface, and beneath that another surface’.7 But, he concludes, what ultimately distinguishes still-life paintings is a tension between the super-real materiality of the objects and their dissolution, their aloofness and silence: ‘they satisfy so deeply because they offer us intimacy and distance at once, allow us to be both here and gone’.8 He quotes Jules David Prown writing about Raphaelle Peale’s Fruit in a Basket: ‘Of what do still-lives speak? Of relationships – connections, reflections, support, power, balance; of taste, touch and smell; of man and nature, of markets and appetites and genetics and diet; of time, mortality, and regeneration. If we are to understand what a still-life signifies, we must attend closely.’
What might Claesz and Heda have done with oysters had they had access to modern cameras, zoom lenses and electric light? The British Turner Prize nominee Hannah Collins and the Milanese artist Bianca Sforni are contemporary photographers who have been drawn into the oyster spell. Just as Claesz. and Heda turned to more and more monochrome effects in order to pursue the whites and greys of oyster flesh and the gleam of mother-of-pearl, so these painters also work in black and white. By bringing in the frame more tightly on oyster flesh, they ask us to attend even more closely. If seventeenth-century painters had used the oyster to signify sex, desire, hunger and flesh within an elaborate emblem system, oysters, for these twentieth-century women photographers, become the embodiment of the naked flesh of sex itself. Hannah Collins’ Sex, No. 1 (1991), though very specifically titled, is cool and restrained. Oyster water drips out of each of these shallow pools. By placing closed and open oysters together, Collins makes us look at surfaces and depths, inside and outside, hard and soft, all transformed into a spectrum of tones of white through to black, only the dark shadows of seeping fluid breaking the picture frame. Bianca Sforni’s oyster ‘portraits’, grainy matte-textured photographs two feet high, have been described as ‘sexualised enough to make Mapplethorpe’s lilies blush’. Oyster flesh, wet and gaping, fills the frame like an opened flower. An enthusiastic reviewer of her 1993 show at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York wrote: ‘In this swooningly, almost comically erotic fantasy, the famously aphrodisiac animals are shown pried wide open, the freshly exposed flesh all labial fold and pucker . . . they are so vividly wet they seem to positively warp the paper . . . the oysters come as close to pornography as metaphorical imagery can’.9
Paul Hill, Hard to Swallow, 2002, metal.
For other artists, fleshless oyster-shells have been a way of exploring timeless structures for whilst oyster flesh speaks of sex and mutability, oyster-shells speak of eternity. Paul Hill, for instance, an American sculptor from North Carolina, makes actual-size oyster-shells from burnished metal, exploring shapes, folds and colours.10 The metal, highly polished, catches the light as mother-of-pearl does, so the matt, craggy textures of natural oyster-shells are turned inside out by polished complex layerings. Suddenly oysters become metallic crinolines.
Philip Ross, Oyster sculpture, Tomales Bay, California, 2002–3 (after cleaning).
Between the summers of 2000 and 2002 the sculptor Philip Ross, a Stanford University lecturer and an artist-in-residence at San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum, began work on a large oyster sculpture at the Johnson oyster-farm in Tomales Bay, California. He constructed a 23-foot-long metal frame in the shape of the upturned hull of a ship or the ribcage of a huge animal and immersed it in the oyster-spat-rich waters of the Johnson oyster-farm. Young oysters – Ross calls them him ‘little minions’ – made their home here on the smooth metal, which was designed to oxidize and disappear in the water over two years.11 The matured oysters, as their metal bed disappeared from under them, were of course all joined to each other in the shape of the upturned ship’s hull. After three years Ross returned to haul up his oyster wreck from the seabed. A friend described the scene:
the oysters were barely identifiable as themselves as they were covered in a thick oozing seaweed. Of course, it wasn’t green seaweed but a colour more reminiscent of something internal,
bodily – perhaps not unlike how I imagine the pancreas, the lining of the stomach, the mucus from a 100-foot giant, the slime from the hugest of oozing scabs – all pink and orange and fleshy and drippy. Really disgusting. Once they were placed on the barge a zillion crabs and eels started leaping to the floor, flopping around and scuttling to find a crevice in which to hide. It went on like this.
Philip Ross, Oyster sculpture, Tomales Bay (before cleaning)
The final piece, cleaned and bleached white, now stands in the museum – a man-made fossil and upturned wreck, still and quiet, quite different from the grotesque slithering eco-system that emerged from the seabed.
In 2001 the installation artist Stephen Turner devised a series of oyster grottoes in Whitstable and along London’s Tower Bridge foreshore in the tradition of the oyster grottoes built by Victorian children at the beginning of the oyster season, lit by single candles. These wonderful oyster cairns, lit up on the waterside, hauntingly evoke shell middens and early human settlements.
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