Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA - To Jan 18, 2026
France is renowned for its achievements in the visual and culinary arts. Its eminence in those fields is a source of national pride and cultural identity. But in the late 19th century, sociopolitical instability rattled the foundations of both disciplines. In 1871, France lost
the Franco-Prussian War, yielding land and political influence to an alliance that would coalesce into modern Germany. Much of the war was fought on French soil, devastating agriculture and the economy.
The two decades following the war saw the rise of the Impressionist movement in art. Painters adopted freer, more spontaneous techniques in an effort to convey emotion and the effects of natural light. Their interests shifted from aristocratic and religious subjects to natural landscapes and everyday people. Consciously or coincidentally, they positioned themselves to capture the hardships and changes in French society in the wake of the war.
Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism uses the food imagery of the Impressionists as a lens through which to view this history. Their artworks depict abundance and scarcity, consumption and production. Bourgeois restaurants and family dinners contrast with paupers’ tables and breadlines. Portraits of butchers, fishmongers, cooks and vegetable peddlers and scenes of open-air markets hang alongside still lifes of the livestock, game, produce and baked goods they offered. Farming is preindustrial, back-breaking labor carried out with hand tools. La Meule (The Haystack) (1891) is Claude Monet’s idyllic view of a hayfield at sunset. That iconic image could not exist without the work of people like the rake-wielding woman in Julien Dupré’s Haying Scene (1884).
The 50-plus pieces in the exhibition are drawn from more than 20 museums and private collections in Europe and the US. In addition to Monet, they include works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Eva Gonzalès. Farm to Table is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Chrysler Museum of Art; Seattle Art Museum is its only West Coast venue.
Public tours Sat & Sun, 1:15–2:15pm; exhibition talks Nov 13 & Dec 11, 6–8pm.
