The peasant paints: Minor painting and peasant cosmopolitics

Abstract

This article discusses the idea of ‘peasant-painting’ as minor painting, playing with the contrast between ‘paintings-of-peasants’ and ‘paintings-by-peasants’. I argue that the appearance of the figure of the peasant as a genre of Western European painting is inextricably linked with the rise of capitalism and the construction of the modern individualized self, separate from nature. Through ‘naturalistic’ images of peasants in landscapes this in turn enabled the bourgeois gaze to naturalize unequal capitalistic relations. I shall then contrast these paintings-of-peasants, with paintings-by-peasants in the Southwest of Sweden. By examining the conditions of their emergence and circulation, and their use and meaning, we can see that these peasants had an alternative conception of the self and a peasant cosmopolitics which did not separate humans from non-humans. I argue that their practice was a minor painting which formed a communal resistance to the modernizing project in the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries.