In the first of these two articles looking at bottles in paintings, I showed examples of them being used for medicine, science more generally, and had moved on to look at them bearing alcohol for ‘social’ drinking. For some, though, that’s the start of a decline into abuse.
Sava Šumanović’s Bar in Paris from 1929 shows a sailor chatting up two well-dressed women at a bar, with a bottle of champagne poised for opening, in an ice bucket at the left.
His Drunken Boat, from 1927, is his finished version of an unusual motif. Six figures are in a tiny sailing boat in a rough sea, drinking and eating lunch. Two naked women have their arms around one yachtsman. Another man is at the tiller, at the lower left, and a third beside the mast, at the top right; he’s holding a bottle ready to drink from it. In the foreground, the sixth figure wears a long bathing costume.
Adolphe-Félix Cals’ Peasant Woman and Child (1846) appears influenced by Millet’s social realism, in its depiction of rural squalor and the telling wine bottle in the basket.
The descent continues in Edgar Degas’ famous painting In a Café or L’Absinthe from 1873, lamenting the fate of those who ended up drinking that infamously addictive and toxic liqueur.
Jean Béraud’s more academic take on The Absinthe Drinkers from 1908 reworks Degas’ painting, with its two glasses of cloudy absinthe, soda syphon, and jug of water. As a bonus, at the top edge he lines up a parade of coloured glass bottles.
The bottom of this descent is shown in Arturo Michelena’s Charity from 1888, where a pair of bourgeois ladies are arriving to do their bit for charity, in the hovel that is home to a young mother and her small child. Beside the woman, on a small table under the window, are a couple of bottles of her favourite ‘poison’, quite likely absinthe.
As with other glassware, bottles are an opportunity for a virtuoso display of painting technique.
The 23 year-old Swedish painter Hanna Hirsch (Pauli) does that in her Breakfast-Time from 1887. This strikes a wonderful balance between the painterliness of the ground and wooden furniture, and sufficient detail (below) to bring the silverware, porcelain and abundant glassware to life.
Finally, bottles have long been favourite objects to appear in still life paintings, particularly when the artist is pushing the conventions of style.
Paul Cézanne painted Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit in watercolour in 1906, the year of his death. The fruit follow his centrifugal use of colour, the carafe is merely outlined in strokes of ghostly blue, as are the grapes in the centre. The wine bottle, though, is rendered in full colour apart from its blank label.
Three years later, Paul Sérusier painted this Still Life with Bottle and Fruit, where he demonstrated how he was still at heart a realist, even down to modelling surface effects such as the reflections on the bottle.