The Most Perfect Holiday Painting: Antoine Vollon’s “Mound of Butter”
Antoine Vollon, A Mount of Butter (c. 1875-76), National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.
My husband’s family doesn’t have many traditions around the holidays. They do the tree and the gifts, and they always make time to be together, but in terms of this or that specific, idiosyncratic ritual, there isn’t much.
Except one.
I find this out every time I cook with them, like the other day, when we started baking cookies together. I found a recipe online and scrolled down the ingredients. Do we have these, I asked. Sugar, flour, Crisco? “Butter,” they all said in unison. Or this one, I continued, unphased. Molasses, eggs, margarine? “Butter,” they repeated, a little bewildered at my obliviousness.
In their home – and now mine – the holidays are made with butter, accept no exceptions. You stock up at Thanksgiving and use everything that’s left for a buttery, climactic Christmas. You abandon yourself to its creamy richness and save the guilt for January. Which is why, year after year, Antoine Vollon’s “Mound of Butter” from c. 1875-76 always strikes me as the most perfect piece of holiday art imaginable. It is, after all, a luscious, nondenominational narrative of indulgence. It is a still life of exactly what it says it is: an enormous mound of deep yellow Parisian butter. It would most likely have sat in a shop; customers would have purchased slabs, carved off by the dull knife stuck in with what you know was a muted squelch. It is a velvet mountain, loosely wrapped in a cheesecloth, with a few eggs thrown into the foreground to both add some visual texture and a sense of scale.
So, who was Antoine Vollon (1833-1900), butter painter extraordinaire? Vollon was a still life and landscape painter in the tradition of Realism in the second half of the 19th century and an active participant in the Paris Salon. The novelist Emile Zola called him “a virtuoso of the palette,” and his work was avidly collected by none other than the famed instructor of the era, William Merritt Chase. Vollon’s intricate floral and fruit still lives spoke to his commitment to Realism even in the age of Impressionism, and so “Mound of Butter” was a little out of character for him stylistically, but not for his moment. Realism itself was questioning how to best convey the reality of a subject, even if it meant compromising the exactness of the style. And so, how better to depict a painting of butter than to use paint as though it is butter itself? The thick, sumptuous brushstrokes evoke that same smooth richness; it is almost as though the materiality of the butter and the materiality of paint are one.
Antoine Vollon, Assorted Flowers in a Vase with Grapes and a Peach on a Table (c. 1860)
Yet for all its softness, there is something so stately and present about this fatty mound. When the National Gallery of Art acquired this painting in 1992, a curator described it as “the Mont Sainte-Victoire of butter,” referencing Paul Cézanne’s famous subject, the view from his window, which he captured over thirty times as he both experimented with different techniques and honed his style, while simultaneously reinforcing the enduring monumentality of the mountain.
And so too sits this mountain of butter: enduring and monumental, indulgent and banal. Let’s take a moment to appreciate the comfort of traditions, the richness of history, and the plush materiality of this most perfect holiday painting. Accept no exceptions.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1902-6), The Metropolitan Museum of Art