Description
The Meal (The Bananas) – a work that was not painted on canvas
Behind a long table covered with a white cloth stand three young people; we see them from the chest up, two looking straight out at us, the third a little to one side. In the middle of the table stands a large shallow wooden bowl, to its left lies a bunch of red-orange bananas, to the right three round pale fruits. Beside them lie a knife with a dark handle and a white bowl with a blue rim, and at the far right stands a vessel with a red band. Above the figures runs a horizontal green band with pink leaf shapes, like a decorative frieze on the wall. The work is held by the Musee d’Orsay in Paris under the inventory number RF 1954 27. The museum record gives the measurement as height by width: 73 x 92 cm, a landscape format.
Paper, not canvas
The most interesting detail is not in the picture but in the museum’s entry for the materials. It lists not only oil but also paper, canvas and the operation of laying down: the work was painted on paper and only afterwards mounted onto a canvas support. This cannot be checked by looking, so we give it as the museum’s statement and not as our own observation. For a buyer it matters only in so far as the original did not begin on stretched canvas, as one would expect.
The table that cuts the picture
The edge of the table runs the full width of the canvas and divides the scene in two. Below is a still life: fruit, bowl, knife. Above are three faces, ranged in a line over it. The two halves are joined by no action – none of the three touches the fruit – and it is precisely this that makes the work read at once as a still life and as a group portrait.
The red bananas
The bananas in front are not yellow but red-orange, and it is they that carry the colour of the whole scene. Their tone returns in the band on the vessel at the right and in the leaf shapes above the heads, so that the warm red appears three times at three different heights of the picture. The white of the cloth between them holds it all back.
How a hand-painted reproduction is made
Every reproduction here is hand-painted in oil on canvas, stroke by stroke. In this motif the white cloth is the hardest part: if it turns greyish, both the fruit and the faces lose their light. Before dispatch you receive a photograph of the finished work for approval.
- Subject: three young people at a table, before them a bowl, red bananas and pale fruits.
- Technique: oil, by the museum’s record on paper laid down on canvas.
- Sizes: landscape format, from 40 x 32 cm to 200 x 160 cm; 80 x 64 cm and 100 x 80 cm are often chosen.
- Of note: none of the three touches the food on the table.
If the same period interests you, see also Tahitian Women on the Beach, Ia Orana Maria and Arearea (Joyousness).
