The left panel of this grand butcher shop diptych (one could be forgiven for calling it an altarpiece) is less tense in feeling. A customer gives the side-eye to the flacid two and a half pound chicken corpse, which she’s thinking will go nicely with several dozen eggs and a slice of peach-colored loaf. Judging by the lovely Modern era ceiling fan, the well-observed decorative butcher paper dispenser, the out-on-the-town cap and scarf, this painting must date from the golden age of Pecos butchery (assuming there was such an age). The eggs remind me of this painting by Sir Cedric morris.

In this painting, no effort is put into playing down the psycho-killer associations we have with butchers.  The searing but vacant stare of the butcher, the purposeful arrangement of ‘sharps’ and prominent over-head cleaver and hacksaw.  Do butchers really store they cleavers above their heads with binder clips?  They even went to the trouble of painting the two separate colored electrical wires that hold the bare bulb to the ceiling.  I imagine the bulb flickering as we realize that’s not a pencil in his pocket, but a finger.

This is less a portrait of food as it is a portrait of the tools of the butcher.  A trade painting.  Along the lines of this painting from the 13th century (oh, maybe they do store knives above their heads).