Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, c.1495-98, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan
Feasts appear regularly in religious paintings, often with iconographic overtones. Depictions of The Last Supper, such as the celebrated painting by Leonard da Vinci in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan (c. 1495-98), are among the best-known feast subjects. In some compositions, the narrative of Christ and his Apostles is the central subject, but in other feast paintings, the religious narrative appears as a detail – at times almost hidden – within the broader theme of the feast. Such is the case in Veronese’s monumental Wedding at Cana (1563), which encourages the viewer’s eye to delight on the various details of wine poured from amphorae, plates piled with delicacies, and dogs begging in the foreground, before alighting on the figure of Jesus with his radiant halo as its ultimate destination.
Paolo Veronese, The Wedding at Cana, 1563, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Giovanni Bellini, The Feast of the Gods, 1514, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The theme of the feast was also a popular one in mythological scenes. Giovanni Bellini’s The Feast of the Gods (1514) is a painting about bacchanalian revelry more than it is about specific banquet foods, and features nymphs and satyrs in varying states of inebriation. Numerous artists, meanwhile, have painted scenes of the gods at feast celebrations, often centred around a wedding such as that of Peleus and Thetis (for instance, the 1633 composition by Jacob Jordaens). And weddings of the mortal variety have always offered an excuse to paint a feast: consider, for instance, the jolly antics around the banquet table in Peter Brueghel the Elder’s The Peasant Wedding (1567).
Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Peasant Wedding, 1567, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna
In some compositions, the food and drink offer sufficient subject matter through their symbolism and figures are largely or entirely absent from the feast. There is a particular type of still life known as a ‘pronk’, which refers to an especially ornate work and which originated in 1640s Antwerp as a means of demonstrating wealth and abundance. The best-known practitioners of this genre, such as Jan Davidsz. de Heem and Adriaen van Utrecht, piled their tables high with fruit, vegetables, game, exotic seafood including lobsters and oysters, and expensive tableware such as porcelain and silver. These compositions, seemingly a celebration of riches, are in fact vanitas paintings, in which empty containers or decaying food remind the viewer of the impermanence of earthly riches and the need to practice restraint and temperance.
Jean-Léon Gérome Ferris, The First Thanksgiving, 1621, Private Collection
In the early 20th Century, paintings of Thanksgiving itself, such as Jean-Léon Gérome Ferris’s The First Thanksgiving (1912), or Jennie Brownscombe’s painting of the same name executed two years later, tended to sentimentalise – and idealise – the very first Thanksgiving. Both paintings focus on the bountiful harvest, plentiful provisions and amicable interactions between the healthy, well-dressed pilgrims and stereotypical Native Americans, glossing over the realities of the contentious relations between the two groups, as the colonists evicted the native settlers from their land.
In more recent times, on the other hand, depictions of Thanksgiving tend to feature contemporary settings rather than revisionist (and problematic) historical ones. Surely the most famous depiction of a Thanksgiving banquet is Freedom from Want by the American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell. The prolific Rockwell was often dismissed by contemporary critics for his kitsch themes and lack of serious subject matter, yet he remains broadly popular today, and Freedom from Want is among his best-known works. The various family members, modelled on Rockwell’s own friends and family, are depicted in snapshot form gathered around a Thanksgiving table on which the grandmother places a roast turkey. Freedom from Want was painted in November 1042 and published in the 6 March 1943 edition of The Saturday Evening Post at a time when America was at war against the Fascist forces in Europe, and it served as a timely and galvanising reminder of the American freedoms that were under attack.
Norman Rockwell, Freedom from Want, 1943, Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, M.A.
Other 20th-century artists who addressed Thanksgiving as a theme include Horace Pippin, with his Giving Thanks (1942), which also depicts a family at the table; Roy Lichtenstein, in a Pop Art take on a still life of a roast turkey (Turkey, 1961); and Helen Frankenthaler, with her 1972 abstract Thanksgiving Day.
To anyone celebrating today, we wish you a very happy Thanksgiving!