Browse food paintings for sale today. No matter whether you’re just beginning your collection or are looking to add to an existing one, we’re on hand to help you buy food paintings that you love. With everything from Figurative Food Paintings to Illustrative Food Paintings available, you’re sure to find what you’re looking for here.
History of food art
Not sure where to start? Sophie Iremonger is an artist working with a combination of paint, drawing and collage. While it may not be her only focus, food features strongly in her paintings such as Frozen fruits and Blancmanges. Her bold colour palette and mixed media approach provide her work with a unique feel that’s somewhere between still life and pop art. There’s a slightly uncomfortable quality to some of the work, encouraging viewers to step back and consider the subject from a new perspective.
For those with more traditional tastes, Viacheslav Rogin is a talented Russian artist who focuses mainly on still life paintings. His technical excellence and a carefully thought out colour palette allow Rogin to create captivating works, elevating his everyday subjects of fruit and bottles to objects of beauty.
Food is what brings us together, a focal point in life around which we organise our meetings with each other. It comes naturally that food should be a point of interest to artists in their quest to capture life and the world around them. Take a quick look back in art history and you’ll come across countless images of food, from the great banquets of Ancient Greek and Roman art to Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup, via the food symbolism of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Food has a unique ability to capture the zeitgeist of a culture, demonstrating the consumer desires of time and the ways in which people interact with each other, making food paintings an interesting addition to any art collection.
While you’ve probably come across plenty of Renaissance still life paintings featuring bowls of fruit and vegetables, a more unusual artist from this period named Giuseppe Arcimboldo may not have caught your eye. Arcimboldo is known for his bizarre and slightly surreal portraits of the Habsburg Court, where he acted as court painter to three emperors. These paintings show the emperors with faces composed of fruit, usually as a nod to the gods of antiquity in an attempt to solidify the emperors’ power and standing. Little is known about these portraits, but they’re certainly a striking example of food paintings that continue to fascinate art enthusiasts to the modern day.
Fast forward several centuries and food art of an entirely different kind begins to emerge. With the arrival of consumer culture and mass packaging of products in the early 20th Century, food became a subject of fascination for artists such as Warhol, Ruscha and Lichtenstein. As food production shifted up a gear, these artists created food paintings that explored and satirised the culture and advertising surrounding one of our most basic human needs.
