Before everything turned plastic, we carried things around in baskets made from roughly woven materials derived from a range of dried plants, such as reed and willow: wicker or wickerwork baskets. They’re known to have been in widespread use in Egypt over five millennia ago, and have probably been used by humans around the world for a lot longer.
In mythological and religious art, wicker baskets are best known for carrying babies.
Peter Paul Rubens painted two versions of Erichthonius Discovered by the Daughters of Cecrops, this from about 1616. This tells the story of the basket that was given by Minerva to these three daughters, who had strict instructions not to look inside it. Aglauros has just given way to temptation and taken the top off the basket, revealing the infant Ericthonius and a small snake inside.
Classical legend also tells of the role of a basket containing figs in the death of the queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, shown in Eugène Delacroix’s Cleopatra and the Peasant from 1838. In her final hours, Caesar’s men had to disarm the queen to prevent her from stabbing herself. After she had been warned further of her imminent death, she arranged for a peasant to bring her a basket containing asps hidden among figs.
By far the best known religious story with a wicker basket in a leading role is that of the abandonment and discovery of the infant Moses.
Gustave Moreau’s Moïse Exposé sur le Nil (The Infant Moses), from about 1876-78, is a radiantly beautiful depiction of the infant Moses asleep, prior to his discovery in the bulrushes. Moses is new life, new Judaeo-Christian beliefs, new law, and the new regime. Set against a background (derived from photographs of Egyptian ruins) symbolising the ancient, pre-Jewish, and decaying, it laid out Moreau’s hope for the French nation.
It took Lawrence Alma-Tadema to transform this story into The Finding of Moses (1904-05), with Moses being carried in a decorated wicker basket within a royal entourage. This could be a still from a widescreen epic with a cast of thousands.
Wicker baskets have been commonly used to carry meals.
One of Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s last paintings of fables, The Dog Carrying his Dinner to his Master from 1751 tells La Fontaine’s fable of that name. A dog was trained to deliver his master’s dinner when the latter was at work, without eating the food that he was carrying. One day, while carrying his master’s meal, the dog was attacked by another dog. He stood and fought for it until other dogs turned up and joined in. Seeing that he was outnumbered, the trained dog offered to share the food out between them, and seized a large piece for itself.
A wicker basket takes a leading role in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), where two couples are apparently disinterested in the token picnic of fruit and bread that has spilled out from its basket in the left foreground. As the two men talk, fully dressed, a conspicuously naked woman stares unnervingly at the viewer, and the other woman is washing herself in the river behind. If they have indulged in any fruit, it is of the forbidden kind, and that meal was but a side-order to their main.
Jean Geoffroy’s Snack Time, one of his first paintings of children, shows the pupils outside their primary school during a break, armed with their lunchboxes and baskets. The artist tells their stories using subtle hints including their clothes.
François Flameng’s undated Picnic looks back to an earlier era, probably the eighteenth century, when the biggest question was whether the servants brought the right wine. This is more typical of the original outdoor form of pique-nique, an elaborate meal which had been in preparation for some days, and had to be carried into place in a succession of large wicker baskets and hampers.
An abandoned wicker basket can also play a role in telling a more subtle story.
Félix Vallotton’s The Sheaves from 1915 is one of his moving and symbolic images of the Great War. It’s late summer, harvest time, and the ripe corn is being cut and stacked in sheaves. But where are those farmworkers, whose rakes rest against the sheaves, and whose lunch-basket sits on the ground ready to be eaten? Where is the wagon collecting the harvest, and why is the white gate in the distance closed?
Wicker baskets were widely used to gather food, as well as to distribute and consume it.
Henry Herbert La Thangue’s Gathering Plums from 1901 shows a young woman and a boy collecting fallen plums in their wicker baskets under dappled light.
Jean-François Millet’s young couple Going to Work (1851-53) are equipped for their day in the fields. She wears a wicker basket over her head, and carries a sack and a length of rope. He has a pitch-fork on his shoulder, carried as if it were a soldier’s rifle. Both are thin and dishevelled, from their outsize worn-out shoes up to his crumpled hat. The man’s thin ankles are almost a caricature to indicate perpetual hunger, but they still stride out to work in the light of the early morning.
Tomorrow I’ll look at more specific applications of wicker baskets.