Andreas Ludwig

Feuerbach

Nadar [ Pseudonym Of Félix

Ting Chang

Frank Claustrat

Elaine Williamson

Valérie Boudier

Jacques-Louis David

François Topino-Lebrun

December

Jacques Louis

Jules David

Le Peintre

Louis David

Paris

au XVIII e siècle' in

Man is what he eats [Der Mensch ist was er isst]'. What a scurrilous expression of modern sensualistic pseudo-wisdom!

Culinary Ugliness as a 'style'

Since the late eighteenth century, negative references to culinary activities have punctuated the history of art as well as social practices. Examples may be found in literature (where authors would engage in a certain genre alimentaire only to earn their bread and butter), in the theatre (when a performance would faire un four or 'flop'), and in politics (with the cuisine électorale or fishy electoral practices). These references, however, acquired a particular sharpness in the second half of the nineteenth century, when ingredients, preparations and meals became important signs of ugliness when judging contemporary painting.

The combination of these representations soon formed a topos: culinary ugliness. It concerned not represented ugliness -ugly objects or Ugliness as an idea -but, rather, the ugliness of painting: of works whose appearance was considered unpleasant (désagréable) to look at, or otherwise revolting (repoussant), as the word was generally understood in France since the seventeenth century. 7 T h e f o c u s o f t h i s e s s a y i s thus the experience a s

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6 Alain Corbin, 'Histoire et anthropologie sensorielle ' (1990), reprinted in Le Temps, le Désir et l'Horreur (1991), Eng. trans. 'A History and Anthropology of the Senses' in Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses. Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 1995, p. 181-195 (quotation p. 191-192). 7 From the end of the seventeenth century, French dictionaries testify to the aesthetic inflection of the adjective laid: the Dictionnaire universel by Antoine Furetière (1690) and the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise dedié au Roy (1694) define 'laid' respectively as 'qui a une figure, ou des qualités désagréables à la veuë, ou à l'idée que nous nous sommes formées du beau' and 'Il Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness' ! %! distinguished to the theory of ugliness. It will be shown that, in the critical literature published during the Salon, the use of culinary formulae and imagery constituted one of the principal ways of assessing what in a work of art is a failure. The word 'ugly' appears only rarely in this context. It is as if Romanticism, then Realism, by legitimising the aesthetics of ugliness, had imposed on anyone who attempted to express an experience of the ugly to resort to indirect representations. The discourse on taste in the Eighteenth century have also led in this direction. 8 The dietary function, which encompasses the act of eating as well as everything that precedes and follows it, offers the salonniers a vast gamut of vulgar references and motifs, and the means of transmitting their experience of a nonpicturesque and non-heroic ugliness. Aiming neither to invert the classical norms, nor to extend the limits of beauty, ugliness is simply experienced as the negation of art. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this bad painting, without any transcendence, is incarnated by cuisine.

The manifestations of this topos were at once verbal and iconic, serious and parodic.

They can be found in criticism and caricatures, as well as in contemporary art theory, correspondence between artists and in numerous anecdotal sources which comprise the so-called littérature artistique, or art literature. Unlike the ugliness of reality, a crucial leitmotif for the enemies of Gustave Courbet in the 1850s, culinary ugliness was exploited by the champions of academic art as well as by the defenders of modernism. The theme

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! '!

The number, variety and omnipresence of these motifs, which were developed by very different authors, lead me to suggest that culinary ugliness was the dominant 'style' of ugliness in French art, and especially in painting, between the 1850s and 1880s. 12

A Critical Category

Culinary ugliness is, above all, a critical category. It takes the form of an aesthetic judgement using vocabulary, expressions, metaphors and images, which offer a negative assessment of painting. The slang of the studios was crammed with pejorative words, Champfleury in turn used the word in 1863, along with many negative allusions to cuisine, only referring to a pictoriality de chic and old fashions: 'Un tableau a du ragoût quand il est peint avec des ingrédients particuliers, séché au four, surtout quand la pâte sèche sera raclée avec du verre.

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Quelques coups de rabot dans de vieux empâtements, des grattages avec une pierre-ponce, l'huile when Le Rêve ! by Puvis de Chavannes becomes 'A poor wretch dreams he is going to eat asparagus' (Fig. 4). 15 Food is so rich that it offers a variety of themes and situations which can easily be substituted into the actual subject of the picture. A history painting commissioned by the State from Sébastien-Melchior Cornu, Auguste presents to the deputies The metamorphosis of painting into food indicates the failure of the work, but not from just any perspective. Rarely is the subject itself the provocation for such negative treatment. The only exception is the head of John the Baptist at the table of King Herod, Cham, exclaiming: 'If I were Herodias, I would prefer that it were a calf's head' (Fig. 6).

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Indeed, beyond the range of works that we have considered, what condemns the transformation of painting into food is usually not subject but execution: tone, composition and design.

Disgusting Execution

Food constitutes the essential vehicle of criticism regarding formal elements.

Culinary ugliness is the product of bad practices, which reduce painting to its material qualities: ridiculous forms, garish colours and disgusting stuff. Cham unites these three characteristics in two caricatures of the Moon Rise by Daubigny (Salon of 1868), depicting 'two peasants overcome by the stench of cheese, which is standing in for the moon' (Fig. 7), and, the following year, 'Daubigny return[ing] the cheese to the seller who lent it to him to make the moon for his painting' (Fig. 8). By metamorphosing the moon into cheese, it is implied that the pigments are runny and smelly, the colour unnatural, and the motif standardised.

Nothing is said about the cheese itself being unpleasant, the painting is

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! *$!
In another work by Gill, we find a striking interpretation of the expression tartine (a slice of bread and butter etc.), which was used in the studio to signify a (too) large format painting.

The Prodigal Son, a triptych by Edouard Dubufe (Salon of 1866), whose wings were in grisaille, becomes a monumental slice of partly covered bread: 'When M. Dubufe cuts a slice of bread, he cuts a big one. Therefore, there was not enough butter and jam to cover the whole surface' (Fig. 11).

11. Gill, 'Le Salon pour rire', La Lune, 13 May 1866:

'The prodigal son, or the too large tartine by Dubufe: When M. Dubufe cuts a slice of bread, he cuts a big one. Therefore, there was not enough butter and jam to cover the whole surface.'

Cuisine as Dishonourable Work

As an expression of work without art, culinary ugliness also functions as dishonourable work: painting without genius, it relates not to creation but to fabrication, or, more specifically, to its recipe. The studio is the site of these caricatures where bad painting is reduced to cuisine. In the 1866 satire of the blue stocking by Riou (Fig. 12), For Realism can be understood as a somatic activity in which the spectator faces his own physical sensations, Courbet is represented with unlimited appetite. Uncapable of choice and restraint, the realist body is not simply material, but aesthetic, and eventually social. It is a vulgar, popular body, dangerous because in excès. 20

The Bad Spectator

Following bad form and bad work, the third culinary topos is the bad spectator, which manifests itself in the condemnation of the poor, because bodily, aesthetic experience. In 1847, Cham depicts a bourgeois visiting the Salon and considering himself in a small picture of a melon (Fig. 14). The culinary desire of the visitor is the metaphor of an unnatural relationship to the artwork, lowered to the lowest level of consumption, where only physical satisfaction and the senses come into play. (Fig. 15). The taste to which Japhet alludes in 'A tasty subject' (Fig. 16) is implicitly popular, culinary and obscene: in the mass of vulgar spectators, crowding around the picture whose small format was traditionally associated with still life, we only see their bottoms. The confusion of tastes remains at the centre of the images i n w h i c h C h a m represents the buffet of the Salon of 1857, an emblematic setting where the unnatural rapport between art and stomach is played out (Figs. 17, 18, 19). The recurring condemnation of food did not prevent the critic from adopting certain judgements about the gastronomy of his time. Since the end of the eighteenth century, 22 these developments had contaminated other genres of aesthetic discourse. Art criticism echoed the contempt for sugar, which was supposed to spoil the nature of food, and which was considered a regressive taste, peculiar to women and children. 23 This criticism denounced the artificiality of colour and/or the soppiness of inspiration. In 1857,

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Bertall mocked the figures by Bouguereau, 24 which 'the artist knew how to make attractive for children, by covering them with a range of colours like sugared almonds. Violet, rose, coffee, chocolate'. 25 Nearly thirty years later, Edmond Bazire reproached Bouguereau's

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The Decay of Art

The disparaging of the painter's cuisine is analogous to negative discourse attending materialism, which can be found throughout the discourse on painting in the nineteenth century. Like filth or excrement, food is, above all, a substance that lowers painting to the level of a contemptible material. The culinary representations of painting contain the seeds of decay: ingestion leads naturally to defecation, orality to anality. This shift underscores the satire of the animal painter in his studio (Fig. 20), where impasto and manure are implicitly related, as the artist states: 'I'm a painter of animals and I'm not afraid of getting my hands in there.'

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! "*!

Culinary metaphors certainly do not exhaust all the vocabulary of ugliness in painting of this period. But judging by the frequency and variety of its manifestations, the motif of culinary ugliness became almost an obsession in the second half of the nineteenth century. As it developed further in painting, the motif resonated with specific traits in this field. It took on a particular significance at a time when pigment and oil ground, applied to canvas, was the dominant medium. This technique incarnated the ethos of western art, producing not only uses and habits, but also 'material imagination', a fantasy of materials and forms. And this medium possesses a quality that affects its representation: it does not dry, but polymerises, or is transformed through a series of organic chemical reactions, which leads one to say that oil painting resists the passage of time because it stays 'alive'.

This fantasy of immortality of course has a downside: oil painting always runs the risk of rotting. Rot is the dark side of polymerisation; food is its allegory. Thus the ! ""! rotten Fig. 21), 30 t h e g a m e y ( F i g . 22) 31 a n d t h e e x c r e m e n t a l ( F i g s . 23, 24) 32 h a u n t t h e representations of bad painting. 30 In the catalogue of the 1868 Salon, the only work by Eugène Villain (1821-1897) was Derniers moments, a genre scene, but he was better known as a still life painter. ! "$! as a 'mass of decomposing flesh'. 34 Such commentaries were long considered as specific to the reception of modern art when, in fact, their rhetoric was inscribed in the history of the period as a whole. They indeed participate to the same distrust of the material and the perishable that informs the more-natured culinary metaphors. Culinary ugliness, as such, is the expression of the disgust and fear not only of the materiality of painting, but of those who faced it.

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Ambivalence

Throughout this essay, I have focused on the negative aspects of culinary ugliness.

Yet, there is also an undeniable pleasure in tasting food. To what extent are these works ambivalent, and how might they evoke a paradoxical form of pleasure? A case in point is an especially revealing caricature of La Vague by Courbet (Fig. 25). This picture, exhibited at the height of the painter's fame in 1870, was one of the many landscapes painted for connoisseurs who delighted in his rich impasto, an effect that he created by using the palette knife. Stock transforms the landscape into a creamy piece of cake standing on a blade, evoking both the instrument of the painter and the instrument of the gourmet.

Perhaps unconsciously, Stock monumentalises La Vague and promotes the hand of the artist, the only protagonist in the scene. If the caption 'May I offer you a slice of this light painting?' is meant to be ironic (it must have been considered so by the contemporaries of a painter renowned for the heaviness of his painting), 35 the caricature, nonetheless, makes the amateur's mouth water. Paris, Gabriel de Gonet, 1848.

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In Conclusion

In the second half of the nineteenth century, culinary ugliness was the most In so doing, they of course opened themselves to censure as ridiculous, if not dégoûtant.

Food, therefore, did not only contribute to representations of the ugliness of bad, repulsive painting, it also took on an ontology of painting -both as a medium and as a social function -but predominantly in the negative: what painting must not be. In this way, the topos of culinary ugliness belongs to a history of bad taste, much of which still remains to be written, above all in art history.

  proved eminently flexible and adaptable to various situations, its only requirement being a sensually conspicuous object. The images by André Gill and Cham, two caricaturists of opposing aesthetics and ideological parties, display of range of associations between food and painting (Figs.2, 3).Gill's caricature of Le Néophyte by Gustave Doré (Salon of 1868) comparing monks in prayer to pale, withered vegetables, mixes visual and verbal metaphors, as well as formal allusions and puns: a coward was said to have 'the blood of turnips in his veins', and the whole painting is a 'turnip', or, in slang, a weakling. 9 Cham, on the other hand, uses the rhetoric of the recipe to debase the composition of Auguste Schenck's Pigeons et laboureurs (Salon of 1876). He plays on the slippage between the oil of the painter and the oil of the cook, and relates both to the tutelary figure of Baron Brisse, a famous gastronome during the Second Empire whose notoriety had principally been established by the petite presse. 11

  d'une boîte de sardines renversée à propos sur la toile, donnent à certaines peintures romantiques un ragoût particulier, dont le secret est perdu pour la génération actuelle.' ('Dictionnaire à l'usage des connaisseurs qui ne s'y connaissent pas', L'Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs. Paris: E. Dentu, 1864, became 'a mushroom omelette'; in 1874, the painting Goodness, it's cold! byGiuseppe de Nittis was the 'plat du jour' composed of 'three Sweet Cocottes [meaning tarts]Fricassees in the Snow'.14 This list indicates that parodic transformations of paintings into dishes constituted one of the most frequent manifestations of culinary ugliness. In other cases, it is food which bursts into painting, swallowing up the action, as in Le Salon pour rire de 1883 by Japhet,

4Frédérique

  . Japhet [pseudonym of Alexandre Jazet], Le Salon pour rire de 1883. Paris, A l'Imprimerie Nilson et Cie, 1883:'A poor wretch dreams he is going to eat asparagus' of Gaul, assembled in Lyon (15 BC) the constitution according to which these provinces must be directed (Salon of 1872) was translated by Cham into: 'A Roman emperor organises a gingerbread lottery in order to get on good terms with the city of Rheims[sic]'.16 Gingerbread (a speciality of Reims since the Middle Ages) was a popular cake traditionally sold at fairs, taking the form of different characters.17 The gingerbread man was a recurring motif in art criticism used to mock badly drawn figures, as in a caricature by Gill of the Couvent sous les armes, l'Espagne en 1811 by Georges-Jean Vibert (Salon of 1868) (Fig.5) in which the caption mimics the rhetoric of advertisement and its dietary arguments: 'There's gingerbread, and then there's gingerbread. Good gingerbread is signed Vibert and never hurt anybody'.

  6. C h a m , ' L e S a l o n p o u r r i r e ' , Le Charivari, 31 May 1872: 'If I were Herodias, I would prefer that it were a calf's head' Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness' ! *"! damned by association. This destructive comparison implies a double assumption: of the cheese as a standardised product and of the painting as autonomous masterpiece, which neither the one nor the other is in reality. No one cheese is an exact copy of another, for its making is often the result of close individual attention, whereas many painters, like Daubigny, sold replicas a n d v a r i a n t s o f s u c c e s s f u l c o m p o s i t i o n s . O p p o s i n g p i c t o r i a l 'creation' to cheese 'fabrication' reveals an idealistic conception of both, all the more necessary for criticism, which in itself is often a literature à l'estomac (with a nerve), based on easy, mercenary effects and snap judgements. 7. Cham, 'Salon de 1868', Le Charivari, 31 May 1868: 'Two peasants overcome by the stench of cheese, which is standing in for the moon' 8. Cham, Le Salon de 1869 charivarisé. Paris, A. de Vresse, 1869: 'Daubigny returns the cheese to the seller who lent it to him to make the moon for his painting.' Colour is crucial in this type of caricature, underscored by the fact that in French, as in many other languages, a single word often signifies both colour and food: marron, orange, jaune citron, rouge cerise. In culinary metaphors, colour is represented not merely as hue, Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness' ! *#! but mainly as material. 18 The transformation of paint into food reveals various fantasies about the textures of painting and what they evoke. Bertall proves himself to be a virtuoso in this type of interpretation: Terrains d'automne by Théodore Rousseau (Salon of 1849) changes into 'Painting in the clay oven' (Fig. 9), while Naufrage sur la côte du Bohuslän by Marcus Larson (Salon of 1857) 19 suggests to him a 'Lobster cooked in its juice at sunset, Swedish sauce, executed by Marcus Larson the Ostrogoth' (Fig. 10). 9. Bertall [pseudonym of Charles Albert d'Arnoux], 'Revue comique du Salon de peinture, de sculpture d'architecture, etc., etc., etc.', Journal pour rire n°78, 28 July 1849: 'Painting in the clay oven by M. Rousseau.' 10. Bertall, 'Le Salon de 1857 dépeint et dessiné par Bertall', Journal amusant n°81, 18 July 1857: 'Lobster cooked in its juice at sunset, Swedish sauce executed by Marcus Larson the Ostrogoth.'

  studio and kitchen are two equivalent places where the female artist spends her time: 'Madame w o r k s s o m e t i m e s a t t h e L o u v r e , a n d s o m e t i m e s a t h o m e . W h a t a f u nny concoction!'. Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness' ! *%! 12. Édouard Riou, 'Costume d'artiste', Petit Journal pour rire, n°492, 1865: 'Madame works sometimes at the Louvre, and sometime at home. What a funny concoction!' More explicitly, in 1863 Gustave Courbet appears i n A m é d é e P a s t e l o t ' s 'La Photographomanie' as a 'positive' inspector (Fig. 13): working in front of a table,leaning over a plate, a glass and a bottle, he incarnates not an artist but a glutton.

  15. Gédéon [pseudonym of Gédéon Baril], 'Au Salon', Le Hanneton, 28 May 1868: 'What are you going to do? Sorry, I were gonna pick a bunch o'grapes to cool us down.' 16. Japhet, Le Salon pour rire de 1883. Paris, A l'Imprimerie Nilson et Cie, 1883: 'A tasty subject.' In these three examples, what is scorned is the way in which the non-educated public -whether peasant or bourgeois philistin -addresses art. They reveal a corrupted aesthetic relationship, where the spectator annihilates the object. Charles Baudelaire saw in this consumption the emblem of his time, and he placed it ironically at the opening of his Salon of 1846: 'Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal. You understand its function, you gentleman of the bourgeoisie -whether law-givers or shopkeepers -when the seventh or the eighth hour strikes and you bend your Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness' ! *(! tired head towards the embers of your hearth or the cushions of your armchair.' 21

  17. Cham, 'Promenades à l'exposition', Le Charivari, 4 August 1857: '-All the tables are full at the buffet. This exhibition is so badly organised. These devilish paintings take up all the space.' 18. Cham, 'Promenades à l'exposition', Le Charivari, 6 August 1857: '-Oh Heavens! You had the honour of your works being accepted at the exhibition. Are you a painter? -No sir. Sculptor? -No sir. I am a cook, I am in charge of the buffet.'

  Édouard Riou, 'Costumes d'artistes', Petit Journal pour rire, n°492, 1865: 'I am a painter of animals and I am not afraid of getting my hands in there.'! Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness'

Frédérique

  31 A caricature of L'Alcool by Anatole-Henry de Beaulieu. 32 Cham, Salon de 1857 illustré. Paris: Librairie Nouvelle/Bureau du Charivari, 1857 (after Gustave Courbet, Demoiselles des bords de la Seine, 1857. Paris, Musée du Petit-Palais); Le Salon pour rire, 1874, 2 e éd. Paris: Au bureau du Charivari, 1874 (Le Bon Bock by Edouard Manet had been a great success at the 1873 Salon). 21. Bertall, 'Promenade au Salon', Journal amusant, 16 May 1868: 'Still Life, by Villain. Portraits of expired onions… it's depressing.' 22. Japhet, Le Salon pour rire de 1883. Paris, À l'Imprimerie Nilson et Cie, 1883: 'M. Beaulieu. A gamey fellow gets high to prove that he is too ripe for his times.'From the 1860s to the 1880s, culinary ugliness was the primary expression of the death of painting, a leitmotif in the criticism of avant-garde of the nineteenth century to rival those of illness (Romanticism) and dirt (Realism). This anxiety reached its heights in certain reactions triggered by modern art: when Paul de Saint-Victor wrote 'the crowd presses up to the putrefied Olympia as if it were at the morgue', 33 or when Albert Wolff described the Female Torso by Renoir displayed at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874

33

  Paul de Saint-Victor, 'Le Salon de 1865', La Presse, 28 May 1865. 23. Cham, 'Promenade à l'exposition', Le Charivari, 8 July 1857: 'Society women with a sudden attack of the colic in the country (by M. Courbet). The painter wanted to prove that he could portrait the well-bred lady as well as the common woman.' Cham, Le Salon pour rire, 1874, 2 e éd. Paris, Au bureau du Charivari, 1874: 'Manet. After the Bock [pint]! Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness'

Frédérique

  significant, though not the only means to expressed what in the artwork is 'absolute difference' (according to Hegel's formula): the failure of beauty, or the negativity of painting. Art criticism, and in particular caricature, whose principal focus is ugliness, gave food a demonstrative function by turning it into a metaphor of medium without art, corruption of the aesthetic relation. The very essence of painting, which ought to preserve its models from death and oblivion, appears to be attacked in ultimate representations borrowing from the traditional vanitas its rhetoric of the rotten.The choice of expressing the decay of painting through food should not only be explained by the return of a repressed proximity. The importance o f n e g a t i v e representations of cuisine coincides with the development of gastronomy as the art of cooking, of appreciating it and speaking of it. Valuing the table as a ground for exercising taste and refinement posed a threat to previous representations of culture, especially in the fine arts. The art of painting, whose elevation had been the result of a long and hard process, was emulated by a new venue whose materiality was difficult to ignore. But those who wanted to redefine art in corporeal and sensory terms -modern artists -could be tempted by the subversive potential of l'art de la table.

(

  Translated from the French by Edward Payne) Frédérique Desbuissons, s cientific advisor at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA), Paris / s enior lecturer in Art H istory, Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne : 'The Studio and the Kitchen: Culinary Ugliness as Pictorial Stigmatisation in Nineteenth-Century France', in Andrei Pop et Mechtild Widrich eds., Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory. To be published by Tauris, London, 2013.

  Paris) at the beginning of the Third Republic, and died in July 1876. For Baron Brisse and

	Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness'
	playing on the metaphorical comparisons between painting and food. Writers appropriated
	these words, making common their usage in order to legitimise their discourse on art.
	Through the medium of the press, they popularised expressions such as jus de pruneau, or
	prune juice (when referring to the dark tonality of a painting); plat d'épinards, or spinach
	(for a bad landscape); ragoût, or stew (signifying an affected pictoriality). 13
	3. Cham [pseudonym of Amédée Charles Henri de Noé], 'Le Salon pour rire', Le A large number of caricatures are based on these phrases. The systematic use of
	Charivari, 19 May 1876: 'Mr Schenck: metaphors and puns peculiar to caricature turns the medium into the most important
	Beef sautéed with pigeons. Painting retouched by the Baron Brisse, all in oil (don't know a mode of expression for culinary ugliness. I therefore place particular emphasis on this
	thing about cooking)' genre, with the proviso that these motifs were present throughout the art discourse of this
	period. The career of Bertall (1820-1882) gives us a good sample. In 1852, he called a
	portrait by Hébert 'au jus de pruneau', with prune juice; in 1855, The Barley Harvest by
	John Linnell was a 'plum pudding'; in 1857, the Razzia by Emile Loubon was transformed
	into Beef and Lamb Sautéed in Cream; in 1868, the caricaturist stopped in front of Young Girl
	Cooking a pot-au-feu with Necklaces and Bracelets; in 1869, the Reclining Woman by Jean-
	Jacques Henner turned into a 'skate in black butter'; in 1872, the Canal Saint-Marc by
	his equivocal reputation as a gastronome, see Jean-Léo, Le Baron Brisse, un gastronome du Second
	Empire. Bruxelles: Le Grenier du Collectionneur, 1992.
	12 The medical historian Marcel Sendrail suggested that the notion of 'style' -that traditional art-
	historical category -invites a consideration of the historical nature of phenomena such as diseases.
	He claimed that illnesses 'concourent à la définition d'une culture. Chaque siècle se réclame d'un
	style pathologique, comme il se réclame d'un style littéraire ou décoratif ou monumental.' See
	Marcel Sendrail, 'Civilisations et styles pathologiques', in Le serpent et le miroir. Paris: Plon, 1954,
	p. 212-237 (quotation p. 224).
	!	(!

  As for the peasant woman drawn by Gédéon, trying to pick the Raisins by Alexis Kreyder at the 1868 Salon, she re-enacts the fable of Zeuxis to the great displeasure of the guard: 'What are you going to do?' 'Sorry, I were gonna pick a bunch o'grapes to cool us down'

	Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness'
	Le Charivari, 9 April 1847!
	!	*'!

20

On the realist painter as huge eater and drinker, see my contribution 'Gros, gras et grossier : l'empâtement de Gustave Courbet' in Trop gros ? L'obésité et ses représentations. Julia Csergo ed. Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2009, pp. 198-212. Close to that subject, see also 'La chair du Réalisme : le corps de Gustave Courbet' in Courbet à neuf, Mathilde Arnoux et al. eds. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme/Musée d'Orsay, 2010, pp. 65-82. 14. Cham, 'Le Salon de 1847 illustré',

  'goddesses in whipped cream'.26 Later still, the Nabis painter, Emile Bernard, accused Impressionism in general, and Monet in particular, of being a 'confiseur' (confectioner) of landscapes.27 Like cheese, some meals are more dubious than others: sauces, suspected of masking the appearance and taste of food, as well as stews or omelettes, whose ingredients blend together indistinctly.28 These are 'opaque' preparations, whose condemnation echoes the classical requirement for clarity and legibility in art. Diderot's positive image of the ragoût has no equivalent in nineteenth century art literature, where comparison of painting to food is never a compliment.29

	Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness'
	Le Charivari, 6 August 1857:
	'What's missing in this exhibition is a
	master. Yes but we have a master chef.'!
	Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, 2001, p. 223-230; Pascal Ory, Le Discours gastronomique français des
	origines à nos jours. Paris: Gallimard, 1998.
	23 On the taste for sugar and its association with feminity and childhood, see Rolande Bonnain, 'La
	femme, l'amour et le sucre', Papilles n.8, April 1995, p. 18 sq.
	!	"+!

22 See Jean-Claude Bonnet, 'L'éclosion de la littérature gastronomique au dix-huitième siècle', in Livres en bouche. Cinq siècles d'art culinaire français du quatorzième siècle au dix-huitième siècle, exh. cat.

24

William Bouguereau exhibited in 1857 Les Quatre heures du jour (plafond). Location unknown.

25

Bertall, 'Le Salon de 1857 dépeint et dessiné par Bertall', Journal amusant n.85, 15 August 1857.

19. Cham, 'Promenades à l'exposition',

  Wolff, 'Le calendrier parisien', Le Figaro, 3 April 1876.

	Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness'
	35 See Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Courbet's Materialism', Oxford Art Journal, vol.32, n.2, July 2008,
	p. 251-260.
	!	"%!

25. Stock, Stock-Album n°4, June 1870: 'The Wave, by Courbet. May I offer you a slice of this light painting?...'

The multiplicity of culinary motifs in art literature is contemporaneous with the development of 'rules of the stomach', or gastronomie, in France, which sets the notion of 'eating well' against more traditional conceptions of taste.

36

In this light, culinary ugliness may be understood as a manifestation of collective, conflicting representations about values of cuisine and its recognition as an essential cultural practice. From the First Empire, books such as the Code gourmand by Romieu and Raisson endeavoured to inculcate in their contemporaries the table manners and principles which were 'the complement of any liberal education'.

37

The second half of the century witnessed a major increase in learned and boulevardières publications concerning gastronomy, which strengthened ties between artists, writers and gastronomes. Fine arts and literature were not protected from culinary intrusions; they were open fields, subject to new influences. More than anyone, Bertall

  36 See in particular Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, 'A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in Nineteenth-Century France', in Laurence R. Schehr and Allen S. Weiss eds., French Food on the table, on the page, and in French Culture. New York/London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 5-50. Physiologie du goût (Fig.26)38 and Eugène Briffault's Paris à table; 39 Gill, like Baron Brisse to whom Cham paid homage in 1876, was among the regular customers at the pension Laveur, along with Courbet, Etienne Carjat, Jules Vallès and Léon Gambetta.40 Gastronomy, which had established cuisine as an art, was democratised in the form of 'cuisine bourgeoise', and extended its hegemony under the label of 'cuisine internationale'. Some artists and writers claimed popular forms of food and gave them an artistic status.The Realists who drank beer and ate sauerkraut at the brasserie Andler elevated the Soupe au fromage (cheese soup) to an avant-garde song. 41 Twenty years later, Manet transmuted in his 1872 Salon success Le Bon Bock the portrait of a barfly in the very sign of Modernism and of its alternative culture.42

	37 Horace-Napoléon Raisson and Auguste Romieu, Code gourmand, manuel complet de gastronomie, contenant les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l'art de bien vivre. Paris: Ambroise Dupont et Cie, developed a wide range of culinary motifs in his caricatures; he also illustrated Brillat-1827, p. Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness' Savarin's
	!	"&!

V: 'Au milieu des bouleversements successifs de la civilisation, une puissance a grandi, qui domine toutes les autres. Amie des aristocraties, alliée des républiques, soutien des États constitutionnels, la Gastronomie est la reine du monde!'

  Le Baron Brisse, un gastronome du Second Empire. Brussels: Le Grenier du Collectionneur, 1992, pp. 52-53. 41 La Soupe au fromage was originally a poem by the Realist writer Max Buchon, a Fourierist close to Victor Considérant, who lived in exile in Switzerland from 2 December 1851. His Parisian friends turned it into the 'hymne du Réalisme'. The poem is reproduced in Max Buchon, Poésies franccomtoises, tableaux domestiques et champêtres. Salins/Besançon: Duvernois et Billet/Bulle et Gérard, 1862, pp. 29-30.

38

The first time in 1848 for the G. de Gonet edition, the second in 1851 for a less expensive edition by G. Barba. Both are available on Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

39

Eugène Briffault, Paris à table (1846), reprint Genève/Paris: Slatkine, 1980. 40 Jean-Léo, 42 F. Desbuissons, 'A l'enseigne du Bon Bock', 48/14, la revue du musée d'Orsay n.30, 2010/1, pp. 34-44. Frédérique Desbuissons, 'Culinary Ugliness' ! "'! 26. Bertall, in Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, La Physiologie du goût, o u m é d i t a t i o n s d e g a s t r o n o m i e transcendante. Ouvrage théorique, historique et à l'ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens (1826).

to the minister Roland that there was no need to