I still have a blog posting backlog, but that’s nothing new. This painting is effectively a seventeenth-century supermarket, although one with rather more livestock wandering around and considerably less concern about refrigeration. Un marché by the Flemish painter Matheus van Helmont shows a market taking place in an imaginary square, complete with a fountain, Italian-looking buildings and enough food to make it clear that subtlety was not really the objective.
As an aside, it’s not unusual not to know the precise birth date of an artist from this period, but there’s even uncertainty over when Van Helmont died. He was born in Antwerp in 1623, but sources variously give his death as around 1679 or simply sometime after 1679. I’m used to a little uncertainty in seventeenth-century biography, but that’s still impressively vague.
Anyway, the produce is everywhere and these were the bad old times before Tesco Express came about. Anyone wanting a chicken apparently had to negotiate with another human being and then take responsibility for carrying it home themselves, which all feels rather sub-optimal. There are baskets of fruit and vegetables, game, poultry and various other things being bought, sold, carried and inspected. There are no aisles, no price labels and no loyalty card scheme, but the basic principle is recognisable enough, namely turn up, find what you want, haggle over it and try not to trip over a dog.
The abundance is also slightly deceptive. Among all the food and activity, there are poorer figures in the foreground, including a beggar. That stops the scene being simply a cheerful celebration of plenty. Van Helmont is showing a busy commercial world, but not everybody within it is benefiting from that prosperity in the same way. The square itself is imaginary, with its fountain and Italian-influenced architecture, but the people, produce and differences in social status are drawn from the world Van Helmont knew. It is essentially a fictional branch of a seventeenth-century supermarket chain stocked with very real social inequality.
I like paintings such as this because there’s no obvious point at which you’ve finished looking at them. Every little group seems to contain another argument, transaction, animal or basket of food that I hadn’t noticed before. I’m not sure I learned much about efficient seventeenth-century retail management, but I did establish that Tesco Express has significantly reduced the number of chickens wandering around near the checkout. I sometimes think I think too much about these paintings.
