Ways of peeling

Rachel Hendry on citrus, still life, and the aesthetics of exposure.

I am soothed by citrus. Specifically, paintings of citrus. I find myself walking through galleries, eyes hungry for the segment of an orange or the peel of a lemon or the foliage of a grapefruit tree. When, eventually, I find them, I sit in their presence and I feel calm.

Bataille d’oranges (1969) is a painting by the French realist Georges Rohner (1913-2000). A large, off white surface—a table covered in a thick cloth, perhaps—takes up the majority of the canvas, where a large crowd of oranges gathers. Some stand alone in the throng, or nestle and pile up against each other. Many are whole and unbothered, others sliced neatly in half, hemispheres turned towards heaven. The rest sit in varying states of undress: peel pirouetting off of them in ribbons, segments tentatively unfurling from one another, skin curiously prised open. I see them for what they truly are.

“The loss of mystery occurs simultaneously with the offering of the means for creating a shared mystery,” writes John Berger in his seminal book Ways of Seeing, adapted from the BBC series of the same name. I look again at the furnishing of the fruit. They keep no secrets from me. What shame do we share? What explicit encounters? What destruction under the hands of desire have we known?  

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When purchasing a fruit, the majority of us would prefer our oranges to be whole and unblemished. It is an act of love, though, for someone to strip the skin away and pry the segments apart for us. Would you peel an orange for me? was a recent viral prompt on social media to ascertain the strength of a relationship.

But when it comes to oil on canvas, composition yields to decomposition—a transition that coaxes us into one of our own, as observed by Mark Doty in Still Life With Oysters and Lemon. “...By looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn’t a thing at all,” Doty writes of a work by Dutch master Jan Davidsz. de Heem. “But something just on the edge of dissolving. Into what? Tears, gladness—you’ve felt like this before, haven’t you?”

Lemon groves and orangeries may be associated with the sun-soaked climes of Southern Europe, but it is the drearier north where their fruits frequented the Dutch still life paintings of the early 17th century. For a nation weaponizing and wallowing in the wealth of the newly founded Dutch East India Company, citrus—imported, novel, modern—became a symbol of success, utilized in the vocabulary of memento mori to signify an extremity of status, a hierarchy of taste. Oh, you didn’t know to adorn your centerpiece with lemons? these paintings are saying, Well, never mind. Luckily for you we had the forethought to immortalize our dining tables for you. Look how cultured they are, how generous.

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