Bottles are also made of materials other than glass, and these narrow-necked containers have been around since ancient times. The first glass bottles were made in the Fertile Crescent in about 1500 BCE, but their fabrication remained difficult until 1 CE, since which they have been blown from molten glass. While human glass-blowers continue to fascinate spectators today, since 1886 the process has become increasingly automated, and glass bottles have been manufactured entirely by machine for the last 120 years.
Salomon de Bray’s painting of Odysseus and Circe (1650-55) shows a maid pouring Circe’s potion from a bottle into the krater-like goblet held by Odysseus.
One of the strongest associations of glass bottles in nineteenth century paintings is with medicinal potions.
Emmery Rondahl’s The Doctor’s Orders (1882) shows a country doctor writing a prescription for an older patient tucked up in a magnificent fitted bed. On the chair between them, in the centre of the painting, is a bottle of medicine and a spoon.
Luke Fildes’ painting of The Doctor (1891) was a commission for Sir Henry Tate, founder of the Tate Gallery. This shows a family physician staring in great concern at a sick child. On the table at the left, by the oil lamp, is a glass bottle of straw-coloured medicine.
In Félix Vallotton’s early Naturalist painting of The Sick Girl from 1892, the bedside table prominent in the middle of the room has a small dark-coloured medicine bottle, a tall bottle containing a pale liquid, and a wide-based flask of water. Her treatment is clearly more sophisticated.
Honoré Daumier’s Le Malade Imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) (c 1860-2) refers to the popular Molière play of the same name from 1673. It shows Argan, the hypochondriac hero of the play, suffering his imaginary illness in his armchair, his physician feeling his pulse at the right wrist, and the physician’s assistant poised behind, wielding a large enema syringe. Argan appears ill, drawn, and worried; the physician wears an expressionless mask beneath tousled almost Medusan hair, and his assistant is gaunt and grimly eager to engage. By Argan’s left elbow, on a small table next to the armchair, a clutch of medicine bottles stands ready.
In Naturalist paintings of the late nineteenth century, glass bottles also became a sign of modern science, replacing the alembics and stranger vessels of the alchemist.
Following the death of the physiologist Claude Bernard, the Sorbonne (where he had taught) commissioned Léon Lhermitte to paint his portrait in 1886. Sadly I’ve been unable to trace an image of the original, but Claude Bernard and His Pupils is a faithful copy of the painting that Lhermitte exhibited at the Salon in 1889. This shows Bernard in the midst of performing an experiment on a rabbit, his students discussing its results, and one writing the experimental observations in the laboratory daybook. Behind them are shelves filled with glass bottles.
Joaquín Sorolla’s Research, or under its original Spanish title of Una investigación o El Dr. Simarro en el Laboratorio, from 1897, looks at the world of the eminent Dr. Simarro among colleagues and students in the laboratory. He is here preparing specimens for microscopy, presumably using his staining technique. The table is covered with bottles of chemicals used in that process, and the chunky metal object in the centre foreground is a microtome, used for cutting very thin sections of tissue embedded in paraffin wax, prior to their staining, for study under the microscope.
Glass bottles containing alcoholic drinks are also widely featured in paintings.
Nikolai Astrup’s Fjøsfrieri (Early Courting) (1904) shows the early phase of ‘clothed courting’ in the unromantic surroundings of a cowshed. The young man has a bottle of drink in his pocket; whether that’s to give him courage or to weaken the resistance of his girlfriend is unclear.
This couple have hidden themselves in the cowshed, out of everyone’s way, but the boyfriend appears unaware that they are being watched by someone from up in the rafters of the roof. From the apparent direction of gaze of the girlfriend, and the blush on her cheeks, she has just noticed the peeping tom or watchful relative. The setting is enhanced by the sunlight pouring through the far window, illuminating two rows of the back-ends of cows. The wood floor between the cows appears decorated with small sketches, which are in fact piles of cow dung. Courting in the country must have been a rich sensory experience.
Under the Lamp, painted by Marie Bracquemond in 1887, shows Alfred Sisley and his wife dining in the Braquemonds’ house at Sèvres, with two glass bottles on the table between them.
For his Small Table at Dusk from 1921, Henri Le Sidaner visited the Petits Fossés at Nemours, not far from the city of Paris, on the River Loing, near where Alfred Sisley had painted many landscapes about forty years earlier. This table is laid for two, each with a bottle of beer.
This leads us on to tomorrow’s sequel, where I start with the unintended consequences of the contents of those bottles of alcohol.