Twelve paintings show a meal that will never be eaten, from Leonardo's Last Supper and Van Gogh's Potato Eaters to Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party and Rockwell's Freedom from Want. Each one stops the dinner at a chosen point, from the food carried in to the plates pushed away.
At some of these tables, someone is not allowed to eat, and one banquet brought its artist before the Inquisition.
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How These Were Chosen
A table suits a painter. It lines people up side by side, so a whole group fits into one picture, and it shows their order: who sits at the head, who stands, who carries the dishes in.
The food adds what a still life offers, the shine of silver and oysters, the weight of a loaf. A meal also unfolds in time, from the first dish to the last glass, and the painter must choose where to stop it.
Each of the twelve paintings shows the food or the service and makes it count, never a table used as mere furniture. At many of them, the person who serves or the person celebrated does not touch the food: a cook, a servant, a bride.
12. Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want (1943)
The plates are still empty in Norman Rockwell's Freedom from Want. A woman in an apron sets a roast turkey down at the head of a family table, and nobody has picked up a fork yet. The whole picture hangs on that instant.
That turkey also illustrates a political idea. Rockwell was the illustrator behind many covers of The Saturday Evening Post, a weekly magazine read across the United States, and this canvas was made for its pages.
In January 1941, in his State of the Union address to Congress, President Franklin Roosevelt had named four freedoms worth defending: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Before the year was out, the United States had entered the Second World War. In 1943, in the middle of that war, the Post published Rockwell's answer to the speech, one picture for each freedom, and this one ran on March 6.
The magazine had given him eight weeks for the series. The four canvases took him seven months.
Much of that time went into his models. Rockwell lived in Arlington, Vermont, and he built each picture from people he knew, asking neighbors and members of his own family to pose in his studio, one at a time.
The woman holding the platter was Mrs. Thaddeus Wheaton, the cook of the Rockwell household. Painted one by one, a family that never sat down together had to look like one around the same dinner.
To join them, Rockwell gave himself a hard problem: white plates on a white tablecloth, with clear glasses of water beside them.
That pale band of china, cloth and water fills the center of the canvas, between the turkey and the faces. The eye crosses the empty plates before it reaches the food, which is still on its way to them.
At a Glance
Artist: Norman Rockwell (1894 to 1978), American
Painted: 1943
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 116.2 × 90.2 cm (45.75 × 35.5 in)
Where to see it: Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
About This Painting
What did Roosevelt mean by freedom from want?
In his speech of 1941, Roosevelt described it as economic understandings that would secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world.
Who was Carlos Bulosan?
A Filipino immigrant, poet, novelist and labor organizer. He wrote the essay that ran beside Rockwell's painting in The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1943.
11. Jean-François de Troy, The Oyster Lunch (1735)
Above a round table of gentlemen eating oysters, in Jean-François de Troy's The Oyster Lunch, a champagne cork is flying through the air. The servants on the left have stopped to follow it with their eyes. The canvas was painted for a king's dining room, and that bottle is the reason people still remember it.