Desire and domestic economy

Seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, at its best, derives an unsettling power from its transfiguration of the commonplace. (1) Subjects often banal in the extreme are removed from the ordinary context of experience and, perpetually fixed by the painter's deft brush, transfix our gaze to become the objects of an odd fascination, a fascination seemingly inappropriate to their original nature. Recognition--"this is a world like our own"--disturbingly plays off the image's absolute removal, as a work of art, from that world; although (unlike in later forms of genre painting) little within the images themselves, such as the facture or cropping, interferes with Dutch images' insistence on the truth of their replicative fictions. To call this aesthetic "realistic" is to do it a disservice, for its effect is not to mimic what is seen but rather, like its Early Netherlandish precedents, to propose--yet only ever propose--a particular model of seeing, ordering, and interpreting the world under the powerfully persu asive guise of mimesis. (2) Therefore, secondary or iconographic meanings can be absorbed into the transfigured worlds of genre paintings without overwhelming their sense of veracity, becoming instead part of a larger argument or proposition about the subject shown--a subject that may emerge, in its altered state, as being more worthy of our fascination than we had first imagined.

These are not claims that would hold for every Dutch genre painting, but they could be applied to entire subgenres and are particularly valid for individual works of the greatest thoughtfulness and complexity. Take, for instance, Gabriel Metsu's Bird Seller (Fig. 1). It is a picture of grocery shopping: a young housewife choosing, with a subtle gesture, that night's dinner. If Metsu indeed transfigures such a commonplace subject into an aesthetic moment that is both breathtakingly beautiful and perfectly "realistic," this is what we would expect from a skilled artist in the 1660s. But Metsu's painting is no simple reflection, however transformed, of an ordinary or plausible contemporary scene. Like so much genre imagery, it draws on a well-established visual discourse on its subject; in this case, Metsu refers to a quite specific source, a print by Gillis van Breen (Fig. 2). In his print Van Breen had shown an older housewife approaching a disreputable poulterer who, instead of holding out a cock to her, reac hes possessively into his trousers. An inscription below the image provides their dialogue:

"How much is that bird, poulterer?"

"He's sold."

"To whom?"

"To the landlady, whom I bird all year long!"

Thus from a scene of simple food exchange we slip, via a tireless Dutch pun, into the world of sexual innuendo; one in which, indeed, the boundary between the traffic in birds and the traffic in "birding" is by no means clear. (3) Van Breen creates a scene where the locus of economic power is unmistakable, as it is in all scenes of bought love--but it is in the hands of a woman. It is she who makes the first advances, asking to buy a bird, while it is the man's reply that transforms what we had read as primarily an economic request into a primarily sexual one. And ultimately his banter becomes a refusal of market exchange on the grounds of refusing erotic exchange, so that whatever it is that this woman wants, she is not going to get it. Metsu's version of their encounter delicately revises the dynamic between the pair, rewrites the implied dialogue. Now the man appears to make the advances--"Do you want my bird?"--leaving to the woman the responsibility of articulating her own desires.

So, as Freud might have asked before Metsu's painting, what is it that a woman wants? That is, does a woman really want to "be birded"? Or does she actually want to have a bird of her own, that is to say, does she want (that which signifies the possession of) power? And, as Freud might have gone on to remark, sometimes a bird is just a bird. Perhaps Metsu's woman just wants to buy a chicken for dinner. Would that matter?

I introduce Freud here not because I propose to pursue a psychoanalytic reading of Metsu's image but simply because Freud most famously articulated a set of questions that bourgeois capitalist culture had already been fretting over for generations. They are questions that, indeed, Metsu's painting itself quite neatly poses. To render those questions in art historical terms would be to return us to the realism versus symbolism debate that has plagued the study of Dutch art for the past several decades. But I would argue instead that Metsu's painting is not one that we may choose to interpret "realistically" (the bird is just a bird) or "symbolically" (the bird is a sexual innuendo) according to our interpretative position. The painting proposes both readings; it necessitates both readings. And by doing so, it questions the nature of women's desire, a desire that it suggests may be erotic, or economic, or both. In this way, its aesthetic of realism, or the transfigured commonplace, provides a way of imagining, of making concrete, what had become an insoluble conflict in Dutch society--a conflict between competing ideologies and the world of experience they mediated.