Students Convinced Cambridge University to Remove a ‘Slightly Repulsive’ 17th-Century Painting From Their Dining Hall

Upset students at Cambridge
University successfully petitioned to have a painting depicting a
butcher removed from their dining hall. The painting,
The Fowl Market
by the studio of early-17th-century
Dutch painter Frans Snyders, loomed large above those in the dining
room at Hughes Hall, a postgraduate school within
Cambridge.

The painting depicts the butcher
at his labors, surrounded by a veritable mountain of dead animals.
Nearby, a living dog appears to be barking.

“Some diners felt unable to eat
because it was on the wall,” a spokeswoman from Cambridge
told The
Telegraph in November.
“People who don’t eat meat found it slightly repulsive. They asked
for it to come down.”

And even carnivores might not
exactly what to be confronted with an artistic depiction of where
their food comes from.

“Generally speaking, and
regardless of its traditional character and social status, meat
tends to have a negative image mainly due to its association with
the living animal, handling practices and slaughter conditions, the
presence of blood, environmental issues, and religious,
ideological, ethical, or moral concerns,” reads a 2014 study
published by Meat Science
Journal in
2014.

Snyders was an important Dutch
painter in his time, and one of the earliest animaliers, specialist
painters who mainly painted animal subjects. This led him to
collaborate with Peter Paul Reubens on several occasions. Snyders
painted the eagle who would eat Prometheus’s perpetually regrowing
liver, punishment for Prometheus stealing Zeus’s fire, in
Reubens’s Prometheus
Bound (c. 1611–1612,
completed by 1618). Snyders also painted the snake hair on
Reubens’s c.1618 painting Medusa.

The Fowl Market
had been on long-term loan to Hughes
Hall from Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. After the painting was
removed in November, it was restored and placed into “Feast & Fast:
The Art of Food in Europe 1500–1800,” a show that “will tease out
many contemporary and controversial issues—such as the origins of
food and food security, overconsumption in times of austerity, and
our relationship with animals and nature—thereby linking the past
with our present, and encouraging visitors to question and rethink
our relationship with food,” according to press materials from the
museum.

The museum will have a
12-foot-tall pineapple installed outside on its front lawn for the
duration of the exhibition, created by British “food artist” duo
Bompas & Parr, who became famous for their gelatin-building
creations.

It’s unclear what, if any,
artwork Hughes Hall will hang in place of its banished
butcher.

The post Students Convinced Cambridge University to Remove a
‘Slightly Repulsive’ 17th-Century Painting From Their Dining
Hall appeared first on artnet News.