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Interiors by Design: Scullery and utility room
As I approach the end of this series looking at paintings of interiors, I reach the rooms well out of sight, those that weren’t talked about in polite company. They often used to be known as the scullery, and now as utility rooms. These are where the dull maintenance tasks took place, where the washing was done by maids, the vegetables prepared for the kitchen, and so on. Although never popular in paintings, they have also brought us one of the masterpieces in the European canon.
Portraits of women washing linen first became popular in Dutch and Flemish ‘cabinet’ paintings, such as Gabriël Metsu’s Washerwoman (c 1650), along with other scenes of household and similar activities. This painting appears authentic and almost socially realist: the young woman appears to be a servant, dressed in her working clothes, with only her forearms bare, and her head covered. She’s in the dark and dingy lower levels of the house, and hanging up by her tub is a large earthenware vessel used to draw water. She looks tired, her eyes staring blankly at the viewer.
It took Jan Vermeer to transform a maid at work in a scullery into a masterpiece, in his Milkmaid from about 1658-1661.
A maid is pouring milk from a jug, beside a tabletop with bread. In the left foreground the bread and pots rest on a folded Dutch octagonal table, covered with a mid-blue cloth. A wicker basket of bread is nearest the viewer, broken and smaller pieces of different types of bread behind and towards the woman, in the centre. Behind the bread is a dark blue studded mug with pewter lid, and just in front of the woman a brown earthenware ‘Dutch oven’ pot into which she is pouring milk.
At the left edge is a plain leaded window casting daylight onto the scene. One of its panes is broken, leaving a small hole. Hanging high on the wall on the left are a wickerwork bread basket and a shiny brass pail. The wall behind is white and bare apart from a couple of nails embedded towards its top, and several small holes where other nails once were. At its foot, at the bottom right, five Delft tiles run along the base. In front of those is a traditional foot-warmer, consisting of a metal coal holder inside a wooden case. The floor is dull red, with scattered detritus on it.
Although now much better-known for his still lifes, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Laundress (c 1735) is one of his many fine genre paintings. This shows a more humorous view of life ‘below stairs’ in a contemporary household. A woman has her voluminous sleeves rolled up and her head well-covered as she launders in a large wooden tub. She looks off to the left of the painting, with a wry smile on her lips.
In front of her, a small child in tatty clothing is blowing a large bubble from a straw, perhaps using some of the soapy water from the washing tub. At the right is one of the cats, looking as inscrutable as ever. Through a partly open door, a maid is seen hanging clean washing up on an indoor line.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Laundress (1761) is in the dilapidated servants’ area, probably in a cellar, where this provocative and flirtaceous young maid is washing the household linen.
The archetype of the maid who seems to have spent all her time in the scullery is Cinderella, in the popular European folk tale.
Edward Burne-Jones’ Cinderella from 1863 shows her reverted to her plain clothes after the ball, but still wearing one glass slipper on her left foot. She is seen in a scullery with a dull, patched, and grubby working dress and apron. Behind her is a densely packed display of blue crockery in the upper section of a large dresser.
John Everett Millais’ version is very different. A much younger girl, Cinderella is sat in her working dress, clutching a broomstick with her left hand, and with a peacock feather in her right. She also has a wistful expression, staring into the distance almost in the direction of the viewer. The only other cue to the narrative is a mouse, seen at the bottom left. She wears a small red skull-cap that could be an odd part of her ball outfit, but her feet are bare, and there is no sign of any glass slipper.
Early in his career, Edgar Degas started painting a series of laundresses toiling indoors. Woman Ironing (c 1869) shows one of the army of women engaged or enslaved in this occupation in Paris at the time. She is young yet stands like an automaton, staring emotionlessly at the viewer. Her right hand moves an iron (not one of today’s convenient electrically-heated models) over an expanse of white linen in front of her. Her left arm hangs limply at her side, and her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep. The room is full of her work, which threatens to engulf her.
Degas’ less gloomy painting of a Woman Ironing (c 1876-87) maintains the impression of this being protracted, backbreaking work, only slightly relieved by the colourful garments hanging around the laundress as she starches and presses white shirts.
