THE ART OF THE TABLE: FEASTS AND FANTASY / LET THEM EAT CAKE!

At the heart of the home, whether rich or poor, is a fascination with food, and this shared experience not only provides the perfect opportunity to flaunt wealth and status through elaborate artefacts, but also illustrates shifting fashions and styles of eating. Through the centuries food and its rituals have provided a consistent theme for artists to celebrate, to analyse their world and even to develop complex ideas of morality. For the medieval and Christian world, bread and wine are the emblems of faith, in 17th century Spain and Holland still-life painting captures the prosperity of the age, and in the 19th century the informality of cafes and bars illustrates the arrival of a new social and urban order.

Lavish still life is emblematic of the idea of Plenty, but from Velasquez to Manet it is also the opportunity for the most sophisticated and painterly studies of surface and texture. In the fantastical 16th century images of Giuseppe Archimboldo, however, Man quite literally becomes the food he eats, whereas, in the 1970’s, Judy Chicago explored contemporary feminism through the vehicle of a dinner party. Finally, we look, too, at images of cooking and of eating itself as it becomes the focus of social rituals and aspiration - celebration, seduction, births and escapes.

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