Still Life and Feminine Space, co-authored with Andrea Kurtz

The husband must be on the street to practise his trade
The wife must stay at home to be in the kitchen
The diligent practice of street wisdom may in the man be
praised
But with the delicate wife, there should be quiet and steady
ways
So you, industrious husband, go earn your living
While you, O young wife, attend to your household - Jacob Cats

In his article “Still Life and ‘Feminine’ Space” Norman Bryson discusses gendered spaces and how gender roles within these spaces figure in still life scenes. In his argument, Bryson uses genre scenes as a frame for interpreting still lifes. However, his argument hastily defines feminine space in terms of genre scenes and subsequently links domestic areas with the space of still life scenes. In oversimplifying the impact of society on the division of gender roles in different spaces, he leaves out the important aspects of spectatorship and cultural context.

Several inconsistencies in Bryson’s argument indicate that a discussion of audience and cultural practices is necessary. Although the article does not focus exclusively on Dutch art, the examples we will discuss in this essay come from the Dutch tradition. We will look specifically at the motif of the table as an indicator of spatial definition in both genre painting and still life. Before we analyze still life and genre painting more critically, we will first present a brief overview of Bryson’s argument.

Bryson begins the chapter with an analysis of forms. He states that forms such as jugs, plates, and bowls are purely functional and therefore “indestructible” (137). Because these objects transcend history and culture, they are threatening to individuality. Bryson claims that because these forms do not need human intervention, they threaten the human’s role in the world (138). Artistic compositions containing familiar forms like the bowl and bottles in Coster’s White Soup Bowl are “overlooked” (140) because they are so mundane. In this way, the forms can be threatening but at the same time overlooked. Bryson regards trompe l’oeil still life paintings as images of “the world minus human consciousness, the look of the world before our entry into it or after our departure from it” (143). To him, these pictures are more threatening because they involve even less human presence than regular still lifes which often appear as though an artist has set them up to-be-looked-at.

Bryson proceeds to speak about dichotomies of high and low subjects and constative and performative levels in genre painting. The constative level of a painting is its literal message, while the performative level is how the artist chooses to express the message. As Bryson demonstrates that usually the constative level of the painting takes precedent over the performative. However, in paintings like Pieter’s Aertsen’s The Butcher’s Stall, the constative and performative levels are reversed. In this case, the meaning of the painting is subordinated to how the artist presents the story. The Biblical narrative of the Flight into Egypt is difficult to see, and once the viewer notices it, the display of meat impacts his interpretation. The high of a Biblical painting is also transformed to the low of a still life because of the reversal of scale of both low-life and historical aspects (147-149). Bryson establishes here that the spaces within an artistic composition can influence the viewer’s interpretation.

Using Vermeer’s Soldier and Laughing Girl, he argues that interior space is domestic, and in its domesticity is inherently feminine. He makes the claim that since still lifes are situated on tables, they are in domestic spaces. Bryson claims that in Soldier and Laughing Girl the viewer can see that the man is uncomfortable in the feminine interior. He points out that the man still has his hat on, which shows he has just been outside, and the hat itself intersects with the map on the wall to indicate the man’s worldliness. In addition, the man’s “formally crooked elbow” (159) marks his discomfort. On the other hand, the woman is “truly at home in the interior world” (159). She is reposed, her hands are folded, and “no such awkwardness attends [her]” (159). With his comments on genre scenes, Bryson sets up his discussion of still lifes.

Jan Vermeer, Soldier and Laughing Girl

In the next section of the chapter, Bryson holds to the idea that the still lifes men paint are inherently different from the still lifes women paint. Bryson asserts that in order to view still lifes properly, the viewer must take into account the recurring table motif as an indicator of a feminine space. Therefore, when a man paints a still life, he refashions the feminine domestic space in order to assert his own masculinity and cancel the lowness of the household (160). Placing male paraphernalia into a still life composition “[signals] the male’s inability or refusal to harmonise with the domestic space” (160). He contrasts the male style of still life painting with the female, stating that in female still lifes:

there is no desire to inflate the scene beyond itself; domestic life is left as it is, not translated into another, supposedly ‘higher’ discourse (of achievement, rank or wealth). The painter is able to participate directly in the space without anxiety about her capacity or right to do so...and there is no attempt to find for the scene any ulterior justification (162).

Bryson continues the discussion of masculine and feminine still life space using Freudian theory. He sees still life as exclusionary because it is an alien feminine space. He likens his own idea that men want to return to the feminine spaces depicted in still lifes to Freud’s idea that men desire to ‘return to the womb’. At the same time, men must separate from women to define their own gender roles. Male artists defeminize feminine space by including in their still lifes objects symbolic of wealth and ownership, and in doing so they achieve the contradictory goal of both returning to and separating from the woman as mother. As in Chinese Vase and Gold Cup, both by Willem Kalf, (no images available) the artist elevates the objects in still life into a “higher” genre.

After his discourse on the reappropriation of female spaces, Bryson briefly touches on women as painters and difference in male and female gazes. He points out that “throughout its history, still life has been a genre regarded as appropriate for women painters to work in” (174) because it “[requires] no thought at all to produce” (175). Further he quotes both Reynolds and Shaftesbury as they speak about the female way of seeing. Reynolds points out that color is the most crucial part of flower paintings, and since it is a “sensuous detail,” it demonstrates the female’s “failure to attain the level of ‘general ideas’”(176). To clarify, Reynolds means that because women pay more visual attention to small details of surface and texture, they fail to grasp the purpose of high art.

Bryson invokes Shaftesbury’s commentary on the female gaze:

Shaftesbury’s words indicate two distinct modes of vision, divided between the sexes at birth: To the male, vision under abstraction, rising above mere detail and sensuous engagement to attain the general over-view; to the female, vision attuned to the sensuous detail and surfaces of the world, color, texture, rich stuffs and silks (177).

From this Bryson derives the conclusion that because women see on a level of minute detail, it is more appropriate for them to paint within the still life genre because they cannot comprehend the “elevated forms of painting” (178).

In concluding his article, Bryson reiterates his point that the male reappropriates and refashions feminine space on his own terms in order to feel comfortable and validated within it. However, his conclusion does not address the nature of the viewer’s ambivalence toward still lifes or its source, which is the question he stated he would answer with the article (136). He also does not take into account the possibility that Dutch spaces were not rigidly divided along gender lines. In addition, he fails to elucidate the connection he draws between genre scenes and still lifes. We will explore the motif of the table in Dutch painting in the context of Bryson’s assumption that he can equate genre and still life spaces.

We have isolated four types of tables in both genre and still life paintings which occupy spaces that are not inherently feminine. These types are: still lifes with no setting, the surgical table, the tavern table in Merry Company scenes, and tables in group portraits. In examining these tables and the spaces they occupy more closely, we realized Bryson’s oversimplification of the relationship between tables, domesticity and the feminine still life.

Many of the examples Bryson uses in this chapter are still lifes composed upon tables. He claims that because they are on tables, these scenes take place in feminine domestic space. However, we noticed that many of still life images do not have identifiable settings. For example, Breakfast by Willem Claesz.-Heda and Vanitas by Pieter Claesz. both occur in spaces with ambiguous backgrounds. Looking at the blank walls behind the objects, the viewer sees the scenes occur inside, but cannot determine in which type of rooms they occur. In these two scenes, nothing marks the interior space as gendered, and therefore Bryson cannot claim as he does in his chapter that any painting containing a table automatically resides in a domestic sphere.

Willem Claesz-Heda Breakfast

Pieter Claesz Vanitas

We also found examples of tables within definitive spaces which were not feminine. In Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp, a crowd of men from the Surgeon’s Guild of Amsterdam gather around a surgical table to examine a cadaver. The viewer can be sure that the table here is not an indication of domesticity; this table does not verify the presence of a kitchen, or even a house. Bryson does not take into account paintings like this one when he asserts that tables denote feminine space.

There are also tables in spaces which are neither masculine nor feminine. Merry Company scenes, such as the one by Honthorst (no image available), are excellent examples of these ‘mixed’ spaces. In this painting, men and women shown in three-quarter view cluster around a tavern table. Neither men nor women dominate the space. Both genders feel reasonably comfortable in the tavern. Bryson, however, overlooks the existence of images depicting the table as a mediator of social interaction between the sexes.

Some tables have identical functions within masculine and feminine spheres. Franz Hals depicts both the Male and Female Regents of the Old Men’s Home (no image available) in different paintings. In each image, the regents pose around a table. Although the figures in the two paintings are of different sexes, the table serves the same purpose in each. Instead of being used for eating, the table is simply a prop and therefore does not define either space as particularly gendered.

The examples of images we have cited point to an inadequacy of Bryson’s discussion of gendered spaces. Bryson obviously oversimplifies the connection between genre painting and still life in order to make his point that all still lifes are in feminine space, and not taking into account spectatorship and cultural context. He leaves out any mention of gender roles in Dutch society and how those roles differed along class lines. From the examples we have looked at, it is easy to see that Bryson did not take into account the complexity of Dutch society.

Although the examples of paintings Bryson gives in the chapter support his use of the space in genre paintings to define the space of still life, his argument does not apply to all paintings in the still life category. He uses very few genre scenes, and gives very narrow interpretations of them. It appears as though he has constructed the argument from a dearth of examples, not paying attention to all spaces present in art. He uses the table to define space as domestic and feminine, but we argue that the table is not always an indicator of the “gender” of a space. In addition, we have found such spaces as the home and the tavern are not always dominated by one and only one sex. There is more fluidity than Bryson accounts for in the definition of spaces within paintings. Though Bryson presents a logical and strongly supported argument, we believe he should have considered more thoroughly the images within a context of seventeenth century Dutch culture and society.