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Carrie Rebora Barratt: Hello. I’m Carrie Rebora Barratt. My colleague Barbara Weinberg and I are co-curators of the exhibition “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition includes more than one hundred iconic works by many of America’s most acclaimed artists, who tell stories about their own times by depicting ordinary people engaged in the tasks and pleasures of everyday life. The paintings range in date from the Revolutionary era to the eve of World War I. The most accomplished—and only successful—woman painter in mid-nineteenth-century America was Lilly Martin Spencer. She brought a spark of romantic wit to her work, showing women in charge of their kitchens, their children, and their men. In Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the 'Lasses, of 1856, a sassy young woman wards off romantic attention with the flirtatious threat of a sticky spoonful of molasses. We asked New York Times columnist and cookbook author Mark Bittman to comment on the painting. Mark Bittman: We’re seeing what look to me like currants, but they’re covered with cabbage leaves, probably to keep them cool, and pears or apples—those are the mottled brown things next to the pineapples—some kind of berries and maybe some cherries as well, green grapes . . . I mean, a whole variety of fruit, or what we take to be fruit, because we think she’s making compote |
