Cider in visual art and photography

European painting has a well-developed tradition of drinking as a subject — tavern interiors, peasant festivities, harvest suppers — but the drink in those pictures is overwhelmingly beer or wine, following the drinking geography of the places where the genres developed. Cider districts are less well served, and cider itself is rarely identifiable in a picture even where it is present.

Where cider country does appear in painting it appears as landscape. Normandy was painted intensively through the nineteenth century, and orchards in blossom are a recurring motif in that work; but an orchard painted for its light and colour is a picture about a landscape, not about a drink or an industry, and it tells a historian about a scene rather than about a practice.

English rural genre painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries includes harvest and orchard subjects, and cider appears within them incidentally. The same caution applies as to literature: pictures of rural labour made for urban buyers are constructions, and their treatment of work is shaped by what the market wanted rural life to look like.

The more valuable visual sources are the ones that were not art. Technical books about cider carry engraved plates of mills and presses, and those plates are among the best evidence for equipment that no longer exists — a seventeenth-century engraving of a roller mill shows a machine nobody alive has seen working.

The pomological plates are the other body of deliberate illustration. Coloured plates of named apple and pear varieties were made to be compared against real fruit, which imposed a discipline of accuracy that art does not: proportion, colour, russet pattern, the shape of the eye and the stalk all had to be right, because the plate’s purpose was identification.

Both genres share a quality worth noting. They were made by people who wanted the picture to be usable, and they are therefore more reliable as evidence than pictures made to be admired. A plate in a county pomona has been checked against fruit; a painting of an orchard has been composed.

From the 1880s, dry plates and then roll film made photography practical away from a studio, and the rural districts of Britain and France were photographed extensively over the following seventy years. Cider making is well represented: pressing, milling, the loaded cart, the cheese being built, the cellar, the harvest gang.

Who was holding the camera matters. A substantial part of this material was made by people documenting a way of life they believed to be disappearing — antiquarians, folklorists, journalists, commercial postcard photographers and, later, official survey photographers. That purpose selects. It favours the horse mill over the engine that had replaced it, the smock over the overall, the old man over the young one, and the archaic method over the current one.

The result is a record that systematically overstates how traditional cider making was at the moment of photography. A picture of a horse-drawn stone mill taken in 1925 is evidence that such a mill existed in 1925; it is not evidence that it was typical, and the presence of a photographer is itself weak evidence that it was not.

Posing is the first thing to establish. Long exposures and the novelty of the camera meant that people stopped work and looked at it, and a group arranged in front of a press with their tools held up is a portrait, not a record of work. Candid working photographs become common only later, and they show different things: hands, posture, how a cheese is actually built.

The people in the frame are the second question. Photographs of cider harvest frequently include women and children in numbers that the documentary record does not, and that discrepancy is itself a finding: the pictures record a workforce the wage accounts do not. It cuts both ways, since a photographer might also arrange a scene to look how he expected it to look.

Clothing is a third. Rural people dressed for a photograph, and best clothes at a press are a sign of an occasion rather than of a working day. Where working clothes appear, the wear and the adaptations in them are good evidence about the work itself.

Commercial photography is the continuation of the same tendency by other means. Twentieth-century cider advertising built orchard scenes deliberately — the loaded cart, the ripe fruit, the old tree, the shirt-sleeved man — and those images circulated far more widely than any documentary photograph. Many of them were made on working farms and are accurate in their details while being entirely constructed in their purpose.

Modern producer photography does the same job with better equipment. The imagery of contemporary cider is orchards, hands and wooden vessels, and it is doing what the interwar poster did: asserting an agricultural origin that the liquid may or may not have.

For a reader trying to understand cider, the useful discipline is to ask of any image what it was made for. Documentary, illustrative, artistic and commercial images are all evidence, and they are evidence of different things.