Replenishing the Ship's Larder with Codfish off the Newfoundland Coast 1811 - 1816

Curator: Today, we are looking at Pavel Petrovich Svinin’s work, dating from 1811 to 1816, entitled "Replenishing the Ship's Larder with Codfish off the Newfoundland Coast." It’s currently held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Editor: My initial impression is how fragile the entire scene feels. The ship appears poised between delicacy and raw maritime labor. It's a captivating tension in this mixed media work. Curator: The depiction of labor here is definitely striking, but the activity is somewhat obscured and the overall composition places an emphasis on the sea. What draws me in most are the flags flying at the ship's masts. Can you talk about the symbols? Editor: Yes, the flags are significant. The one to the left seems like an early iteration of the American flag. Symbolically, the ships would represent new colonial expansion and, maybe, some early environmental damage brought by global trade. But let’s look at this from the angle of art-making. What's intriguing is the use of watercolor combined with oil paints—a departure from strictly academic landscape painting. It suggests an embrace of "folk art," of more raw, immediate materials and processes. Curator: Precisely! By choosing these combined materials, it becomes apparent to the viewer how fragile and provisional this new type of representation of this "New World" really is. Editor: Do you mean it's an almost ethnographic perspective? Not the grand history painting of a war, but the minute recording of how these commodities are consumed in this ship "at sea," caught on the way between the extraction of these codfish from Newfoundland, and back to Europe, likely? The cod represented not just a meal but the mechanics of resource colonialism itself. Curator: Exactly. And look at the rendering of the fish themselves! Rather than glorifying their abundance as part of a "limitless sea", there is a looming ecological threat depicted in this precise snapshot of early capitalism's rapacious appetite, one still with us to this day. Editor: Indeed. And by calling it a “ship’s larder” makes me think not only of the painting techniques used, but of the kind of food available on the ship; the supplies, the hierarchy, how space is utilized, who is profiting from that journey... The painting performs like a microcosm. Curator: It certainly brings home that idea of “small worlds within bigger worlds.” Thank you. Editor: My pleasure, thanks for the talk.