The chocolate (coffee) and its pot.
When examining the coffee pot and its contents as well
as the way in which figures within the painting interact with it, there are two
layers of meaning. Firstly there is the object itself: the coffee pot and
porcelain. Second, there is the substance that it contains: either coffee or
chocolate. The material object may be subsequently examined in two ways: both
as a raw material (the porcelain and the silver) and as an object of labor:
both the labor that has already occurred in its manufacture and the subsequent
labor of leisure in which it is a tool.
Diagram 1. plots these levels of interpretation in a flow chart to make
this clearer (see Diagram 1.).
Nicolas Lancret, The four times of day: Afternoon, 1739-41, oil on
copper, series of four paintings dimensions variable, National gallery
(London).
Silver coffee pot
Any analysis of the raw materials is difficult as it
rely on an unacceptable amount of assumption and conjecture due to the lack of
detail that the objects have been rendered with. It is impossible to know whether the delicate
cups and saucers or china or porcelain. The silver, however does provide a
small room for analysis.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries French
silver was in high demand and attracted extremely high profile patrons - such
as Catherine the great of Russia and the king of Portugal – due to its high
quality craftsmanship and designs. The
large qualities ordered by numerous foreign courts is evidence for this.[1] The silver piece depicted in the painting is
most probably a coffee pot, as has been noted by scholars[2],
as it is consistent with designs of both the early eighteenth century which
followed the style of decoration present in the sixteenth century reign of
Louis XIV and the latter Louis XV designs which were more rococo and highly
decorated in style of the mid eighteenth century.[3] It
demonstrates remarkable similarities with a piece now present in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art by Francois Thomas Germain (1756 – 1757). Consequently the coffee pot could possibly be
the work of Francois Thomas Germain or his father Thomas Germain, also a
silversmith and the most celebrated of the eighteenth century, both of whom
contributed to an enormous percentage of silver plate output in the eighteenth
century until his son’s bankruptcy.[4]
However it is impossible to know.
What is most interesting however about the coffee pot
however is the way that it appears to straddle two styles. Remington notes of silver plate from the mid
eighteenth century period “on the whole silversmiths were neither quick to
discard the traditions of the first quarters of the century nor avid to
interpret the new style. This resulted
in the simultaneous existence of two different systems of decoration and in the
numerous hybrid combinations which such a situation inevitably produces.”[5]
The silver coffee pot in the picture appears to be such a hybrid as it neither
discards the solid, sweeping features of the earlier period with its large
undecorated surfaces nor gives itself over to it, having the shell-esque
details of the rococo present on its feet and lid.
Silver coffee pot as an accessory to the
labor of leisure
In eighteenth century France an individual’s
interaction with interior design and decorative objects provided equal
opportunity for demonstrating skill, knowledge and grace as they did
awkwardness. Items of furniture that
were used in the home were especially designed for various tasks but where at
the same time limited as to what tasks they could be used for. To interact with
these objects it considerable control of self as well as intimate knowledge
with the object itself. Hence, in the
words of Mimi Hellman, objects were not simply owned but performed. The example above demonstrates an object of
leisure’s ability to both accommodate self-fashioning as well as how specific
kinds of behavior and self-fashioning were enforced by the object themselves. Furniture and decorative objects were
therefore even after being completed by the artisan and mediated through a
luxury merchant, marchand-mercier, still objects of labor: a leisure
labor in which individuals would self-fashion identities for both ladies and gentlemen.[6]
Lancret’s The cup of chocolate depicts two
primary individuals who are engaged in the work of labor by interacting with
the coffee pot and the tea set. Hellman
notes that furniture and decorative objects allowed the user to both display
their physical acuity in their use but also the act of skillful interacting
with them also occasioned the display of desirable parts of the body (the long
slender neck draped over the writing table is the example she gives). In the image the mother is taking the
opportunity to interact with the decorative object to display her long delicate
arms and her decided yet seemingly natural gesture in her offering of the
spoonful of chocolate to the child. The
gesture therefore is not casual (although it was very much intended to appear
so as ease at which difficult gestures were managed were a key factor in desirable
self-construction) but is an opportunity exploited by the mother to perform an
act of self-fashioning. Hence there is
in this painting an epistemology of furniture and creation of self.
But this is not all. In the eighteenth century epistemologies
and entertainment were often intertwined with epistemologies often being hidden
in the guise of entertainment.
Crebillon’s novel La sopha which takes the fanciful situation of
a man being transmuted into a sofa until the sofa is used for the declaration
of true love expresses hidden assumptions about how individuals interact with furniture
and the important role that they play in life events. In this context then the child’s place within
the picture takes on a new significance.
The child’s place as been traditionally read as a display about the
process of learning about adulthood and the moving into that state from
childhood. She has left her doll that is
clad in the same silks as her mother to take a sip of chocolate; an adult drink
in the eighteenth century.[7] But the lesson that the child is learning is
more specific than that. Not only is the
mother fashioing an identity for herself in her gestures but she is displaying
this act for the benefit of the child, for whom it is time to learn this same
adult process of fashioning identity. The child has gotten up from her game and
it now directly watching the work of leisure occur, in a moment she will
literally ingest an adult substance (chocolate).
Coffee/ chocolate conundrum
From this perspective it is no longer necessary to
assume that the confounding that occurs between the coffee pot that is painted
and the chocolate that the title refers to is a misnomer. Coffee was a symbolic
drink of the bourgeois order whereas chocolate was much more highly associated
with the aristocracy. Coffee was drunken
upright and at a table and it’s demonstrable ability to “shake” the drinker
awake and prepare them for the working day resulted in coffee not only being
considered a symbolic drink for the bourgeois but also far more closely associated
with the mental than the corporeal.
Chocolate was almost the complete opposite of this. In the eighteenth century, chocolate had lost
the clerical associations that it had when it had been consumed by the church
officials during fasting when it first arrived in Spain. In France it had a new life in which its
supposedly erotic effects aligned it with the corporeal (and the adult) . It was taken lying down or at the toilette
and provided an easy transition from the morning and waking into the latter
periods of the day. Hence in the context of The cup of chocolate the
confusion of the two drinks serves as a repetition of the theme of allusion and
performance of identity. This duplicity
present in this particular performance (bourgeois or aristocratic) will become
clearer in the next section in which vermillion’s ability to both affirm and
confuse class distinctions is discussed.
[1] C.
Louise Avery, ‘French Silver’, The metropolitan museum of art bulletin,
Vol. 29, No. 2, (February), 1934, 32 -36
[2]
Tavener Holmes, Mary and Joseph Focarino, Nicolas
Lancret 1690 – 1743, New York in association with the Frick Collection,
1991.
[3] C.
Louise Avery, ‘French Silver’, The metropolitan museum of art bulletin,
Vol. 29, No. 2, (February), 1934, 32 -36
[4] C.
Louise Avery, ‘French Silver’, The metropolitan museum of art bulletin,
Vol. 29, No. 2, (February), 1934, 32 -36
[5]
Preston Remington, ‘Three centuries of French domestic silver a special
exhibition’, The metropolitan museum of art bulletin, Vol.33, No. 5,
(part 1: May), 1938, 113 and 117 – 126.
[6]
Mimi Hellman, Furniture, ‘Sociability, and the work of leisure in eighteenth
century France’, Eighteenth century studies, Vol.32, No.4 (summer),
1999, 415-445.
[7] Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Tastes of Paradise: a social history of spices, stimulants and
intoxicants, 1980, trans. David Jacobson, New York, 1992.
