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.