Reflections on Michaelina Wautier’s Everyone to His Taste
I sometimes forget that not everyone is on the same egg hunt as I am. Am I really the only one looking for eggs—ceramic eggs, marble eggs, ostrich eggs, egg books, egg lamps, egg paintings—to furnish my home or catalogue in one great egg master file? The fact of the apparent solitariness of my pursuit, or that it was a Wednesday night in early September must have been the reason why mine were the only pair of eyes glued to this painting. I think to myself, I might have even uttered it under my breath: don’t they know the future is in eggs?
By some Leibnitzian turn of events, the permanent collection was closed, so I was forced though not begrudgingly to see the exhibition on view, Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: Three Hundred Years of Flemish Masterworks. Flemish art, its distorted figures, bear the strongest mark of tacit romance and comedy.
When I lay my eyes upon the painting, the rapture of playfulness comes over me. I’ve found an egg. It must have been painted by a woman, think I to myself—it is tender, droll, and unpretentious. On a museum wall of dark dusty blue sits an ornate golden frame, determining the boundaries of the enclosed painting’s world. Inside this world are two youths, one of them holding a boiled egg with its top quarter carefully removed leaving its yolk exposed and penetrated by some object—a piece of bread, likely, but it looks more like a twig—and the other young boy attempting to seize it.
A perfect equilibrium is established. The void-like background is, on the viewer’s left-hand side, engulfing in its obscurity. As left becomes right, the pigment washes from darkness to a dry, powdery earth tone. But the figures display opposing colour schemes; on the viewer’s right, the boy trying to get a hold of the egg is dressed in black fashion, the details of which are hidden from the viewer by sleight of light. His hair is of a self-conscious brown, his face equally dark from being ill-lit and turned away slightly from the viewer. On the other hand, the boy on the viewer’s left seems to be made of angel stuff. His garb is radiantly white and his hair golden, like that of a baby in limbo. Where is his halo?
Equally tender is his demeanour—I am unable to discern any indignation in it. In one hand he holds the oval gift at once softly and protectively, just like a mother would her offspring. With the other, he pushes the thief back. Wautier suggests this scene is a visual representation of the titular adage “Everyone to His Taste”; humorous, but I think the boy on the right has uncovered the same secret which I have known for so long and which draws me to eggs so unwaveringly.