One important staple crop has been largely forgotten from both agricultural and rural history: the humble potato. First imported from South America to Europe in the latter half of the sixteenth century, for the first couple of centuries it was considered exotic eating. It quietly became increasingly important during the eighteenth century, and is now widely credited as the food that enabled the population boom in much of Europe in the nineteenth century.

For several years from 1845, a fungus-like organism late blight caused widespread crop failure in the poorer parts of Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere, causing the Great Irish Famine, with at least a million dying from starvation.

The potato is unusual for storing large amounts of starch in its tuber. Although starch is only about one fifth of the potato by weight, the remainder being water, it came be the staple food for much of the working population, in both country and city. Overton has calculated using estimated crop yields from the early nineteenth century that an acre of potatoes would have provided about 2.5 times as many calories as an acre of wheat.

Like wheat, growing potatoes is a process of amplification. Tubers from the previous crop are sown in the ground, and multiply to yield many times the weight originally sown. Production is thus not dependent on conventional seed, but on seed potatoes with a more limited life. If a whole crop is destroyed by blight, not only is there nothing to eat that year, but the seed potatoes for the following year are also lost. Blight remains in the soil, and once affected that land has to be used for crops other than potatoes.

However, potatoes had other advantages in a war-torn and taxed Europe. While troops rampaging in foreign countryside would often raid or burn fields of grain, damaging or stealing potatoes proved more resistant to invaders. They were also likely to escape taxes or charges levied on other arable crops.

During the eighteenth century, labourers fortunate enough to have a little land they could farm for themselves started to grow potatoes, to supplement their limited diet. Small potato patches sprung up in the countryside, and around towns. Production at scale remained unusual until the following century, when some English counties including Lancashire and Middlesex devoted significant areas to supply the growing cities. That in turn depended on transport such as canals and then railways to deliver sacks of potatoes to urban consumers.

When Vincent van Gogh was living in Borinage in Belgium, he was among labourers whose staple food was potatoes, in one of the areas that had grown them for longer than most. His Still Life with Potatoes, painted in September 1885, is his tribute to the humble vegetable.

Potato production was painted extensively by social realists including Jean-François Millet, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Millet shows this back-breaking work in his Potato Planters from about 1861.

The Potato Harvest from 1855 is another more substantial work developed from Millet’s drawings. In the foreground, a man and woman are working together to fill sacks with the harvested potatoes, to be loaded onto the wagon behind them. The other four work as a team to lift the potatoes using forks and transfer them into wicker baskets, a gruelling task. Although the fields in the left distance are lit by sunshine, the dark scud-clouds of a heavy shower fill the sky at the right. Being poor, none of the workers has any wet-weather gear. The soil is also poor, full of stones, and yields would have been low despite the full sacks shown at the right.

Millet’s most famous single work, The Angelus, was completed around 1857-59. This had been commissioned by the American collector Thomas Gold Appleton, as Prayer for the Potato Crop, but underwent modification before Millet renamed it. At some stage, it’s thought to have included a child’s coffin, but that was overpainted.

It shows a couple, praying the Angelus devotion normally said at six o’clock in the evening, over the potatoes they have been harvesting. It’s dusk, and as the last light of the day fades in the sky, the bell in the distant church is ringing to mark the end of work, and the start of the evening. Next to the man is the fork he has been using to lift potatoes from the poor, stony soil; his wife has been collecting them in a wicker basket, now resting at her feet. Behind them is a basic wheelbarrow with a couple of sacks of potatoes on it, ready to be taken home.

Twenty years later, Jules Bastien-Lepage painted what’s now sometimes known as October or Potato Gatherers (1878), but was originally shown as October: Potato Gatherers.

Vincent van Gogh painted Woman Lifting Potatoes (1885) and similar scenes during his time living with his parents in Nuenen, in North Brabant, the Netherlands.

János Pentelei Molnár’s The Potato Harvest from 1901 takes this theme into the early years of the twentieth century, in Hungary.

Laurits Andersen Ring’s A Man Digging Potatoes from 1901 is pure social realism, as this smallholder uses his spade to lift the potatoes that are his staple diet. I believe that the plants shown here have suffered from potato blight, which also swept Europe periodically causing more famine and death.

Although the girls shown in Léon Frédéric’s Three Sisters from 1896 are clean and well dressed, they’re sat together peeling their staple diet of potatoes in a plain and barren farmhouse. A glimpse of the shoes of the girl at the left confirms that they’re neither destitute nor affluent.

Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (1885) is another revealing insight into the lives of poor labourers in Nuenen, who are about to feast on a large dish of potatoes under the light of an oil lamp.

Émile Friant’s The Frugal Meal (1894) continues the social theme, as a poor family with four daughters sits down to a meal consisting of a bowl piled high with potatoes, and nothing else. More worryingly, the pot on the floor at the left is empty.

Further reading

Christopher Shepherd’s brilliant essay on the history of the potato in The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History (2024), ed. Jeannie Whayne, Oxford UP, ISBN 978 0 19 092416 4.

Wheat and cereals were by no means the only crops grown at scale by farmers, although the acreage devoted to them accounted for the majority of arable land in most parts of Europe until the nineteenth century. Other crops were adopted for two main benefits: to sell for profit as a ‘cash crop’, or to improve the soil, often as part of a crop rotation system.

Buckwheat was a traditional local crop where the land rises up from the bog of Teufelsmoor, an artists’ colony to the north of Bremen, in Lower Saxony. In Fritz Overbeck’s Buckwheat Fields at Weyerberg from about 1897, he catches a small field of the pseudocereal in full flower, the upper parts pale gold in the light of the setting sun. Buckwheat isn’t a grass at all, but is more closely related to sorrel and rhubarb, with edible triangular seeds. It thrives on the poor, acid soils in this area, provided they are well-drained. Because it has a short growing period of only 10-12 weeks, it can suppress summer weeds, and thrives best in soil with low nitrogen content.

Theodor von Hörmann’s oil sketch of a Sainfoin Field at Znaim II from about 1893 shows a crop now little-known: sainfoin, a chalk-loving forage crop which used to be important for working horses. Sainfoin is a legume, so not only feeds the farm’s horses, but also increases the nitrogen content in soil. It’s equally good food for cattle and sheep.

I’m not sure where Mykhaylo Berkos painted these Flax Blooms in 1893; they’re a particularly appropriate theme for an accomplished oil painter, as flax is the source of linseed oil, one of the major drying oils used as a binder in many oil paints, and its fibres can be used for ‘canvas’ too.

The common flax appears to have been first domesticated in the Middle East, and has spread steadily across Europe, reaching northern Europe around five thousand years ago. Unlike other sources of drying oils, it prospers in the cool and wetter climates of northern Europe. It has been used widely for the production of fabrics for clothing and many other purposes, and its seed as a foodstuff, used as an edible oil and ground into flour.

Emile Claus here shows Flax Harvesting in 1904, near his cottage in East Flanders, Belgium. Below are some flax seeds ready for pressing to make linseed oil.

Vincent van Gogh’s painting after Millet shows a Peasant Woman Bruising Flax (1889), an early part of the process of transforming it into linen. Below, Max Liebermann shows a later stage as flax fibres are spun into yarn, in The Flax Barn at Laren (1880-90).

Although grown in more limited quantities, crops used for the manufacture of dyes became important in some regions. Among those was madder, used widely to dye clothing and, after processing, in artists paints.

Jan Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary from about 1654-56 is a good example of the use of Madder Lake by one of the Dutch Masters.

One of the early challenges in the history of art materials was the transformation of vegetable dyes into pigments, in many cases, the process of laking. The need was simple: take a vegetable dye such as the Crimson derived from Madder plants, and fix it into pigment particles which can be dispersed in gum solution (watercolour) or a drying oil medium.

Neither the Romans nor the Greeks appear to have solved this on any scale, but at some time between the Classical civilisations and the pre-Renaissance, someone discovered that aluminium salts would combine with the colourants in Madder extract and make a pigment which was suitable for fine art painting: Madder Lake.

Over time, many different recipes for the preparation of Madder Lakes evolved. By using different species of Madder plant, adjusting the method of extracting the colourants from its root, and using different salts for the laking process, Madder Lakes covered a broad range of hues from pale purples through pinks to brilliant scarlet.

Another important crop was clover, a legume that fixes nitrogen in the soil, so increasing its fertility for subsequent food crops.

Jules Breton’s Blessing of the Wheat in Artois from 1857 shows more than fields of wheat. As the artist wrote to his then fiancée Élodie:
Against a dazzling background of light in which the gold of the wheat combines with the emerald green of the clover, losing itself finally in the sky in a warm, transparent vapour, a solemn and silent procession of country folk moves slowly and piously along, with the sun at their backs and their shadows in front.

Farmers in much of Britain and France didn’t appear to grow many of these alternatives until the eighteenth century, but in the Low Countries of what is now the Netherlands and Belgium they were locally common even before the previous century. This helped build the Low Countries into a great trading nation and bring on the Dutch Golden Age with its fine paintings.

Jan Bieleman has given figures for the percentage of arable land devoted to different types of crop in West-Zeeuws-Vlaanderen between 1670-1795. Throughout those two centuries, wheat and pulses (peas, beans) were most popular at 24-30% each, with barley in third place. Flax was grown on 4% until it decreased after 1720, rapeseed (a brassica crop still grown widely for its oil) on 2-4%, with madder, potatoes and carrots on even less land. Only about 15% of the area was lying fallow at any time, making it highly productive for the period. That leads us to look at crop rotation in the next article, where paintings can be particularly useful as historical records.

Reference

Jan Bieleman (2010), Five Centuries of Farming, a short history of Dutch agriculture 1500-2000, Wageningen Academic, ISBN 978 90 8686 133 0.

In the first of these two articles celebrating the work of generations of women who washed clothes and linen outdoors, and have been featured in landscape paintings, I covered the period up to the end of the 1870s, when Impressionism was at its height. This account resumes at about 1880, and moves on to the early twentieth century.

Alice Havers’ Washerwomen, which given her tragically brief life must have been painted around 1880, shows a wide range of ages, working together, some repairing the clothes, others talking. On the other side of the river, the fruit trees are in blossom.

Later in Eugène Boudin’s career he painted Washerwomen by the River (c 1880-85), above, and Laundresses on the Beach, Low Tide, Aval Cliff, Étretat (c 1890-94), below. The latter painting is remarkable for its rough facture, and for the number of women gathered by one of the most recognisable landmarks on the Normandy coast, the arch of Étretat.

Early in his career, the American artist Charles Courtney Curran painted a series of works showing young women at work outdoors, among which the most successful, A Breezy Day (1887) won the Third Hallgarten Prize for Oils from the National Academy of Design the following year.

Painted when Vincent van Gogh was at Arles, one of his best-known groups of works includes The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (1888). This is one of four oil paintings, a watercolour, and at least four drawings he made of this motif, with the aid of a perspective frame he had made for himself. This shows a traditional wooden drawbridge, one of several over the canal running from Arles to Bouc. Built in the early nineteenth century, it was sadly replaced by concrete in 1930.

In the same year, Paul Gauguin painted a group of women hard at work near Arles in his Washerwomen of Arles I (1888).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s The Laundress (1891) sets a single, quite well-dressed woman doing her washing in one of his sumptuously soft-focus landscapes.

The Norwegian painter Jahn Ekenæs teaches us that, even in the bitter Nordic winters, the washing still had to be done: his Women Doing Laundry Through a Hole in the Ice (1891) seem to have the toughest job of all. Note that only one of them is wearing anything on her hands.

Peder Mørk Mønsted’s Laundry Day (1899) shows kinder conditions during the summer, when doing the washing would surely have been a more popular task.

In common with many of these paintings, Manuel Garcia y Rodriguez uses the white of the linen heightened in sunshine to generate contrast, in his White and Black. Andalucian Landscape. Laundresses in the River Guadaíra from 1903.

As indoor domestic water supplies became widespread during the twentieth century, washing clothing and linen in the countryside died out, and vanished from the landscape.