Mound of butter Antoine Vollon

摘要

At room temperature, butter softens to the spread-able consistency of fresh paint, and then it can be sculpted, pressed into a mold, or smoothed with a wooden spatula, as in Mound of Butter by the 19th-century French painter Antoine Vollon (1875-1885). In this image the marks of the painter, etched into a slab of impasto, are read as scrapes and swirls made by the spatula. The picture looks as though it could have been painted with butter, and perhaps it was-Vollon was known to have mixed pigments with whatever materials were at hand. At the time of this painting, butter was still made by hand on small farms from cow's milk collected over several days. The deep yellow color of this batch of butter suggests that it was tinted with the pigment carotene from plants in the pasture where the cows grazed.