Twelve paintings of kitchens and cooks, from Pieter Aertsen's meat stall of 1551 to Chaim Soutine's pastry cook of about 1919, show what painters did with the person who cooks.
From Antwerp to Paris, the cook served in turn as a punchline, a sermon or an excuse to paint meat and copper, and in a few canvases as the subject. Along the way, the portrait of a pastry cook led an American collector to a painter nobody wanted.
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How These Were Chosen
A kitchen holds food on its way to becoming a meal, and the person whose work will make it one. For a painter it is also a room full of different surfaces, copper, glazed clay, feathers, fish scales and white linen, each catching light in its own way.
In the Netherlands of the 1500s, painters went further and turned the room into a stage, with the food piled in front and a Bible story set far behind it. The cook came with the room, seen at work rather than posing.
The rule for this list is simple. A picture is here when someone prepares food, or when the kitchen and its food carry the meaning, and food still lifes with no trace of cooking were left out.
The list counts down from twelve to one rather than by date, and the twelve keep returning to one question: what to do with the person who cooks.
12. Anna Ancher, The Maid in the Kitchen (1883 to 1886)
Daylight comes through an orange curtain and falls on the back of a young woman bent over the vegetables she is preparing at a kitchen window. Her red skirt sets off the green leaves on the table, and her face is turned away.
Anna Ancher painted the scene between 1883 and 1886 in Skagen, the fishing town at the northern tip of Jutland, the peninsula that forms mainland Denmark. She was born there, and the kitchen is in the hotel her parents ran.
That hidden face matters more than it first seems, because the Danish title, Pigen i køkkenet, can be read two ways. Pige means both a girl and a maid, so the title leaves open whether she is a daughter of the house lending a hand or a servant at work.
Ancher's canvas does not decide either. What remains is the job itself, hands busy at the table and shoulders bent toward the light. Because the sun passes through cloth as well as glass, her back receives the warm glow a portrait usually saves for a face.
At a Glance
Artist: Anna Ancher (1859 to 1935), Danish
Painted: 1883 to 1886
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 87.7 × 68.5 cm (34.5 × 27 in)
Where to see it: The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen
11. Vincent van Gogh, Peasant Woman Cooking by a Fireplace (1885)
Alone in a dark cottage, a peasant woman bends over a fireplace to cook. The room is so dim that for decades the catalogs could only guess what she was making, and one listed the picture as Woman Baking Pancakes.
Vincent van Gogh painted her in the late spring of 1885 in Nuenen, a village in the south of the Netherlands where his father had been pastor, just after he finished The Potato Eaters. The gloom was deliberate, and a few weeks earlier he had put in writing why a peasant picture should look this way.