The beauty of cooking, bathing paintings

Marika Azzopardi is inspired by some of the most mundane yet most beautiful cooking and bathing paintings by great artists.

Cooking and bathing are two of the most mundane tasks we all have to do on a daily basis. Yet, so many artists elevated these chores to a supreme level of exaltation through their interpretation in colour.

Here are some very special bathers and cooks who have remained frozen in action over the centuries.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec depicted women in Parisian brothels – hundreds of drawings, sketches and paintings showing women of all ages going about their life in the sleaziest locations of the French capital – from dancing in salons to brushing their hair in the intimacy of their boudoir, or waiting to have a medical check-up.

This is just one of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s works of the Impressionist period – a five-colour lithograph entitled Woman with a Tub (1896).

Diego Velázquez painted a series of bodegones – natural kitchen and tavern scenes which typically included still lifes. These paintings were a far cry from his depictions of Spanish royalty; they are images which elicit humdrum scenes of Spain’s most common people during the 17th century.

Some of these startlingly realistic paintings are of an exquisite nature and one in particular brings together the mundane and the holy in a very effective way: Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (circa 1618), an oil on canvas.

The Milkmaid (circa 1658-1660) is an exceptional oil on canvas from Johannes Vermeer, whose art was popularised by the 2003 dramatic Webber film.

The Girl with a Pearl Earring was inspired by another of Vermeer’s most prominent paintings. Vermeer had a knack for honing in on one character, usually a female, and bringing her most normal event of the day into focus. Many times, this woman just had to be standing in a room, in the right kind of light, to capture his attention.

A bathroom which is closer to our times was captured by French artist Pierre Bonnard in Nude in a Bathroom (circa 1932). This artist openly admitted that he painted from memory rather than from seeing something directly.

Here, for the umpteenth time, he made a painting of his wife as she finished bathing, a task she did fastidiously and repeatedly as she was obsessed with cleanliness.

This is not the only such painting by Bonnard and we get a feel of the developing nature of the bathroom, where we can recognise the tiles, the bath, the tap… contraptions we are accustomed to enjoying today.

Degas was another French artist inspired by the female figure. Whether he painted a dancer in her tutu or a nude woman going about her bathing routine, he typically lit his canvases with a semi-obscure light of softness and intimacy.

Woman in the Bath was painted in 1886. There is nothing special happening in this picture, but it unfailingly grabs attention anyhow.

Kitchen Scene is a rather chaotic painting, providing a lively take on our way of modern cooking. Nothing is stored away, nothing is orderly... Kitchen Scene, which Dutchman Joachim Wtewael created in 1605, is an indoors/outdoors scene, typical of the period.

It includes a series of still life masterpieces within the whole painting. Note how everything seems to radiate out from the central female standing figure, who is lit up and creates a focal point of attention.