Painters who wanted ordinary people at work had one easy place to find them: the market. Across four centuries and several continents, the pictures they brought back share something their titles rarely mention. The person doing the selling is often a woman, sometimes barefoot behind a soup pot, sometimes swapped for a younger face under the paint.
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How These Were Chosen
A market puts every kind of person in one place, each with a reason to be doing something. Sellers stand behind their stock, buyers weigh and count, and porters push loads through the crowd.
It also gives a painter two pictures in one. The produce, meat or pots on the stall bring textures and colors, and the people around them bring the story. A table of food with no market around it stays off this list.
Every picture here shows a place where goods change hands, from a pushcart in a crowded street to a horse fair. In most of them a sale is under way: a ladle over a pot, a knife under a layer of fat, a buyer pointing at what he wants.
12. John Lewis Krimmel, Pepper-Pot: A Scene in the Philadelphia Market (1811)
Under a wooden market shed in Philadelphia, a Black woman ladles soup out of a tall metal pot while her customers crowd in. A lanky countryman in a top hat points at the bowl he wants, and empty iron hooks hang from the beams above her head. The picture is called Pepper-Pot.
Black Philadelphians like her were a growing presence in the city. Philadelphia counted 240 free Black residents in 1780 and nearly 9,000 by the time this canvas was painted, and selling food was one of the few independent livelihoods open to Black women.
Painters had rarely stopped to look at them. When John Lewis Krimmel, a German-born artist who had been living in the United States for only a year, showed the canvas at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1811, it caught the public's eye, and the painter Charles Willson Peale called it "pointed, spirited, and contemporary." It is now counted among the first paintings to show a Black Philadelphian at work.
Krimmel does not dress up her trade. Everything she needs fits beside her, a pot and a few bowls and spoons on a low round table. She sits barefoot on the floor, while a few steps away a girl holding a basket of flowers wears red shoes.
At a Glance
Artist: John Lewis Krimmel (1786 to 1821)
Painted: 1811
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 49.5 × 39.4 cm (19.5 × 15.5 in)
Where to see it: Philadelphia Museum of Art
About This Painting
What is Philadelphia pepper pot soup?
Pepper pot is a spicy soup of tripe and vegetables that street vendors sold hot in Philadelphia's markets, many of them Black women. Krimmel's picture takes its title from it.
11. Louise Moillon, The Fruit and Vegetable Seller (1630)
In The Fruit and Vegetable Seller, a woman in black silk, with a wide lace collar and a string of pearls, weighs a single fruit in her palm. Across a table heaped with grapes, plums, melons, squashes and artichokes, a second woman in a white headscarf holds out a basket of golden fruit still dressed in its leaves. One of the two is selling and the other is buying, and nothing on the table says which.