Slaughtered Ox in Flemish Kitchen

One expects that Melville would have been highly interested in this work if he saw it in person any time between its acquisition in 1874 and his death in 1891. He would have been interested whether it had been painted by David Teniers the Elder, David Teniers the Younger, or the Workshop of David Teniers the Younger. His eye would have been drawn to the shape and texture of the slaughtered ox hanging from rafters and still dripping fresh blood into a shallow dish beneath the gash where its head had been, the blood still dripping fast enough that the worker carrying the most recent dish of drippings seems to be moving as fast as he can without staining the apron whose whiteness echoes that of the towels hanging across the body of the eviscerated ox, their whiteness harmonizing with the white of the living dog standing in the bright light in the foreground. 

Visually, the light and color of the living figures, culinary implements, and edible ingredients that populate this sunstruck Flemish kitchen would have given Melville’s roving eye and pictorial imagination much to see and savor. But Herman Melville was also the aging man who in his younger years had written the chapter on “The Whale as a Dish,” whose cetacean consumption had not been limited to American whalers like Stubb. French gourmands, English kings, Dunfirmline monks, Arctic Esquimaux, and Dutch whalers all savored different cetacean dishes; Dutch whalers specialized converting scraps of blubber into “fritters” which, “when fresh,” are “brown and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewifes’ dough-nuts or oly cooks.” Of course, you can have too much of a good thing. Because of the “exceeding richness” of its blubber, the whale is “the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good” (NN MD 299). 

The metaphorical “ox of the sea” becomes something more literal when Ishmael turns to those landsmen who are shocked that a whaleman “should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it, too, by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on trial by oxen, he certainly would have been, and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowd of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does that not take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? (NN MD 299-300).  

By the time The Flemish Kitchen was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in 1874, and then exhibited with The Marriage Festival in 1890, New York City bi-peds would have been even further removed from any living knowledge of those dead quadrupeds whose butchered flesh they were so eager to bring home from the meat-market. The Flemish farmer in the 1650s, like the New Bedford whaleman in the 1840s, had hands-on, realistic knowledge of the living creatures whose lives they dispatched for their own livelihoods. 

Teniers in his workshop, like Melville at his writing desk, took the butchering theme far beyond a single painting or chapter. In 1889, fifteen years after The Flemish Kitchen arrived at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the painting currently known as The Butcher Shop was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (fig. 11). This painting represents an earlier stage in the process of "cutting in" the body of an ox. After asking whether the image represents a “butcher’s shop” or “a kitchen,” the Boston website emphasizes the skill with which Teniers “carefully rendered each component of the slaughtered ox: its head and hide in the lower left corner, the thickly painted flayed body front and center, its lungs and liver on the chopping block” (see below). The head of this ox might well consider man his murderer, but he would not be able to speak it because is tongue nailed to the post behind him.  

The Boston website dates this painting to 1642, more than a decade before the 1650s date that was assigned to The Flemish Kitchen in New York. In this way Teniers seems to have been following Rembrandt, who painted his first Slaughtered Ox in the late 1630s and his second in 1655 (Craig, p. 235, figs. 39 a, c and 40 a). An advance review of the Boston painting by William Howe Downes in the Atlantic Monthly of November 1888 shows how the masterful pictorial realism of Teniers the Younger could overcome one viewer’s compunction about the subject itself: 

The huge carcass of a just-butchered ox hangs by its hind-legs in the foreground. All the red and yellow hues of the meat, all the inside structure of the creature, are exposed; the carcass is held open by a horizontal stick, over which hangs a clean white towel. To say that this is superlatively well done is but little; it makes one realize that an ox’s skinned and dressed carcass is a beautiful object in color. There is really nothing, or next to nothing, which cannot be made to seem beautiful in one way or another, when seen aright,--that is, in an artistic way. (647)

In the words of the Dutch painter Jan Steen in “At the Hostelry,” the poem Melville was still revising in the late 1880s, “All’s picturesque beneath the sun” (NN BBO 162). 

As is often the case with Melville, or Hazlitt, or Ruskin, Downes, having made his primary point, plunges into yet more detail by asking: 

Where else shall you find such red and pale yellow tones, so various, fresh, rich and deep? There is absolutely no suggestion of paint in it. The meat is wholly meat, with its appropriate form, textures, and hues. The entrails have been removed, but the suet remains. The hide and horns lie on the floor at the left. The head, sans skin except at the muzzle, is on a bench, above which hangs the tongue on a nail. A dog is drinking blood from a shallow brown dish on the floor, which catches the drip from the carcass.  

The only quibble I have with what Downes writes about this remarkable painting is his declaration that “there are few finer Teniers anywhere, certainly none even remotely approaching it in this country” (647). He had clearly not been down to New York to see The Flemish Kitchen any time since its acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum in 1874. Maybe he managed to see it while it was in the Old Eastern Gallery Y, along with Teniers’s The Marriage Festival and Judith with the Head of Holofernes, from November 1890 through November 1891. 

The Metropolitan Museum had not yet deaccessioned A Flemish Kitchen when Walter Liedtke published The Flemish Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984. By then the painting had become known as Interior of a Farmhouse with a Slaughtered Ox, its attribution had been shifted to the Workshop of Daniel Teniers the Younger, and it was now considered to be a copy of “a lost painting by Teniers,” its date still estimated to be in the mid-1650s. After calling attention to the centrality of the body of the ox in the painting—and the proliferation of such details as the dripping of the blood into the dish, the haste of the man carrying the other dish, the nailing of the tongue “to the post,” and other examples of the “domestic work” inherent in the slaughtering of an ox—Liedtke argues that Teniers in this painting was "extolling the virtue of prudence in terms very familiar to most of his contemporaries” (1: 265). From that point of view this painting is farmhouse equivalent of the chapter on “Stowing Down and Clearing Up” in Moby-Dick. 

One other element of Liedtke’s interpretation relates more closely to the sexual innuendo in Ishmael’s chapter on “The Squeeze of the Hand.” Liedtke finds that the virtue of prudence embodied by the emphasis on cleanliness in the Flemish farmhouse is enlivened by the “erotic undertone” that pervades much of the canvas (see figure 10 again). He notes that “robust young woman” who is “fetching water” is clearly “musing” about something else. He suggests “the objects around her articulated her mood for the contemporary viewer.” These include “the hat on the stick” and “the stick in the pot” as “metaphors for copulation,” “mussel shells” suggestive of “the female sexual organ” and “a pot or pitcher held by a woman” as a “uterine symbol,” four kinds of vegetables associated with “female sexuality” or “sexual stimulants,” and “a broom next to a pail” in front of “a man at a the door” as “a phallic symbol” (1:265).” If Liedtke seems to be reading too much latent eroticism into a detailed painting of a slaughtered ox, consider the oil painting of a Flemish Interior with Slaughtered Ox by David Teniers the Younger now at the Villa Vauban in Luxembourg City, dated 1656 (fig. 12).

What unlike things must meet and mate 

.          .           .          .           .           . 

To wrestle with the angel—Art. (NN PP 280)