© Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
© Sebastián Hidalgo
© Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
This second article considering the reading of knitting and crochet in paintings concludes with its most frequent use, as a sign of the peasant and poverty. This first became prominent in the social realist paintings of the mid-nineteenth century, starting with those of Jean-François Millet.
Millet’s pastel of The Knitting Shepherdess (1856-57) continued his established pastoral theme, showing a young woman engaged in knitting as her flock grazed in broken woodland behind her. In common with other occupations that left the hands free, shepherdesses commonly knitted for their family while they were at work.
A few years later, Millet revisited the theme in his Young Girl Watching her Sheep from about 1860-62. She is knitting in the round with several needles, to produce a long stocking or sleeve.
Young Girl Knitting (1860) is the second painting Jules Breton made of a young woman from his home village of Courrières knitting indoors. Many of his more intimate works like this were sold to private collectors and have never been exhibited.
Breton’s A Peasant Girl Knitting (c 1870) was probably started, if not completed, en plein air in an old orchard near Douarnenez, where the artist and his family often spent their summers. Note that she’s not even wearing clogs, but her feet are bare.
LA Ring’s Smallholders in the village of Ring from 1887 shows a working class couple who lived in the artist’s home village. ‘Polish Niels’ made his living as the village plumber, and supplemented those earnings by selling seeds. He is here making paper bags in which to sell his seeds, as his wife is engaged in knitting, once again in the round.
The Canadian artist Clarence Gagnon’s Brittany Goose Girl from 1908 walks along in her wooden clogs quietly knitting in the golden sunlight of autumn.
When the American painter Winslow Homer lived in the fishing village of Cullercoats on the north-east coast of England in the early 1880s, much of his time was spent painting among the fishlasses and fishwives while their menfolk were at sea. During that time, the women continued with their supporting tasks of knitting and repairing clothing, and repairing nets and gear, as in his charcoal and chalk drawing of Fisher Girls on Shore, Tynemouth from 1884. Rather than wearing wooden clogs, these two have working boots.
One of Henry Herbert La Thangue’s earliest major paintings is this view of The Boat Builder’s Yard, Cancale, Brittany painted in 1881, when he was staying on the Brittany coast. The young Breton woman shown appears out of place, with her working dress, clogs and knitting. She’s surrounded by the tools of and shavings from boat-building in wood. Behind her is the frame of a part-constructed fishing boat similar to those seen in the background at the right, a working boat known as a chaloupe thonière.
These two articles are dedicated to my editor-in-chief, the most prolific knitter I have known, my wife, in thanks for all her support, and technical advice.
Knitting, and its close relative crochet, form strands of wool or yarn into loops that assemble the fibres into fabric. Although machines have long been used to make knitted garments commercially, until the nineteenth century most woollen clothing was still knitted (or crocheted) by hand. Today what’s viewed as a traditional craft almost exclusively for women was, in the past, a popular if not essential activity for many men too, as it was the only way that they could have socks, warm gloves and other garments to wear.
In this article and tomorrow’s sequel, I show a selection of depictions of both knitting and crocheting; tomorrow’s paintings focus on their association with poverty, while this article shows some of their other readings.
By the late nineteenth century, when Thomas Eakins painted some of his few watercolours, knitting by hand was in decline, and seen as a sign of the past.
Eakins’ Seventy Years Ago, from 1877 explores the early Federal period in Philadelphia, prompted by increased interest in that era resulting from the national centennial the previous year. His subject is knitting in the round on three needles, forming a tubular section of garment, perhaps a sock or sleeve. A spinning wheel at the left edge shows her to an accomplished fibrecrafter.
In the autumn of 1860, William Dyce stayed in the Conwy Valley in Wales for six weeks, where he sketched and painted avidly. After his return to London, he painted this Welsh Landscape with Two Women Knitting, showing the rough and rugged scenery above the valley, a rock outcrop filling much of the left half of the painting.
In its centre is an old woman, and to the right a young one, each dressed in traditional clothes, and knitting. The younger wears a formal ensemble that had recently been revived and designated ‘Welsh national costume’, as might be worn for Eisteddfods and other special occasions. They’re both knitting stockings from scavenged scraps of wool, an activity that might have been common earlier in the century and performed indoors at home. It had largely disappeared by 1860, and is conspicuously incongruous for such an outdoor location. Dyce’s painting remains enigmatic.
Depending on the pattern being knitted, the knitter may require periods of intense concentration, making it a sign of detachment from or disinterest in surrounding activities.
William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1876-77) is the first of three paintings by Thomas Eakins showing this wood sculptor carving his Water Nymph and Bittern for a fountain in Philadelphia’s waterworks, in 1808. The water nymph is an allegory of the Schuylkill River, at that time the city’s primary source of water.
Rush had been a founder of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and an enthusiast for the use of nude models in art, as was Eakins. This painting was at least in part an attempt to promote the practice of working from nude models. Seated at the right of the model is a chaperone, who is clearly more interested in her knitting. The model’s complicated clothing is hung and scattered in the light, as if to emphasise her total nudity (apart from a hair-band!). Unfortunately, those scattered garments didn’t go down well, and were deemed scandalous at the time.
LA Ring’s Housewife’s Evening Party from 1905 shows a very different sort of party from those being painted at the time in cities like Paris. This housewife sits crocheting her way through the height of the party, as her husband and a friend discuss a book by the light of the kerosene lantern.
Through the ages, knitting and crochet have been peaceful and productive pastimes for many.
Fibrecraft may have declined in popularity in the cities of the nineteenth century, but it remained commonplace in the provinces and country. François-Joseph Navez here shows a group of Women Spinning in Fondi in 1845, a town roughly midway between Rome and Naples. Two of the women are actively spinning, one has dropped her distaff to gaze pensively at her young baby, and the woman in red in the centre is probably knitting.
In Hans Thoma’s A Peaceful Sunday from 1876, an elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her knitting or crochet, while he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock that’s out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.
Gustave Caillebotte’s portrait of Mademoiselle Boissière Knitting (1877) is one of the first in which he might be said to be painting in Impressionist style. This elderly spinster is working intently.
Anna Ancher’s skills as a colourist and impressionist brighten her Sunshine in the Blue Room, Helga Ancher Crocheting in her Grandmother’s Room, from 1891, as she progressed from realism and became increasingly painterly in her brushstrokes.
In the summer of 1901 Anders Zorn painted this Girl from Dalecarlia Knitting. ‘Cabbage Margit’ (1901) in his town of Mora, deep in the Swedish countryside. She too is knitting in the round.
The Sick Man, painted by LA Ring in 1902, stares grimly, wide-eyed and straight ahead, as if already looking death in the face. Meanwhile his wife sits knitting peacefully, already swathed in black apart from her apron.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, as cities across Europe were growing rapidly, the Arts and Crafts Movement spread from its origins in England to bring a new wave of interest in furniture and other features of domestic interiors. This article shows some paintings of interiors by Nordic artists of that period, giving insight into changes in design taking place across the countries of northern Europe.
Prior to this, interiors in much of this region were vernacular, as shown in Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s Rustic Life from 1887. A young woman sits spinning next to a bed, while an older man is repairing one of his boots in front of the open fire. There’s little in the way of furniture, and what there is has been rough-hewn and is functional.
That same year, the young Swedish artist Carl Larsson painted The Toy Corner inside the family home. His wife Karin was a talented artist who concentrated on interior design, and was responsible for most of the interiors shown in her husband’s paintings. From 1888, their family home just outside Falun in Dalarna became the centre of Larsson’s watercolours that were later published across Europe as examples that many others aspired to.
Homework (1898) shows two of the Larsson children working in the evening by the light of a kerosene lamp, amid decor designed by their mother.
Getting Ready for a Game (1901) shows Karin Larsson preparing a tray of adult refreshments, while two of their young daughters watch from behind the more appropriate teaset. From the layout of the room seen through the open door, the grown-ups are about to enjoy an evening of cards together with friends, surrounded by one of Karin’s exemplary interiors.
The Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring married Sigrid Kähler, daughter of a ceramic artist, who seems to have taken more than a passing interest in the design of their domestic interiors.
In Ring’s At Breakfast from 1898, Sigrid sits reading the ‘leftist’ daily newspaper Politiken in the sunshine.
Ring’s 1904 painting of The Artist’s Wife and Children shows Sigrid with their young son and daughter, in front of a roaring fire. In the next room is the same table from At Breakfast above, and the table in the left foreground has a carefully-polished surface allowing Ring to show subtle reflections.
Ring went on to paint more traditional homes, including this Interior with a Farmer Reading a Newspaper from 1911. This farmer, better-off than the average peasant for sure, sits reading the newspaper by the light streaming in from its windows. Roses provide a brilliant splash of colour to the far left, and there’s a clock ticking on the wall. The open doors lead through into the far end of the house, which is sparsely furnished by heavy wooden items like a wardrobe and a chest.
Although life in small villages in the fjords of Norway was more rustic, there was still scope for a little design flair. Nikolai Astrup’s Interior Still Life: Living Room at Sandalstrand from about 1921 includes a tapestry hanging in the corner, a painting on the wall, potted plants, a bowl of fruit, and an articulated wooden figure leaning against the pitcher of milk.
Until relatively recently, Icelandic society had remained strongly traditional, and homes in its capital Reykjavik were decorated in older style. Þórarinn’s glimpse into The Artist’s Home (1924) shows this well.
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.
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.
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