Apple of my Eye

There’s a strangeness to Christine Kühlenthal’s The Picnic 1913. At first glance, it offers a perfectly ordinary scene: three friends gather beneath a peeling apple tree at the close of a summer’s day. Lilies bloom against a white fence. Beyond the garden, the Rhineland stretches into a blue-green haze beneath a multicoloured sunset. And yet the longer I look at this painting, the less stable it becomes. It begins to feel like a dream disguised as a picnic.

Kühlenthal (1895–1976) painted the work while studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, drawing upon a summer spent with her friends Charlie and Norah at her family home near Koblenz, Germany. Charlie leans against the twisting tree trunk smoking a pipe; Norah kneels beside him, extending an arm towards Kühlenthal herself, who sits in yellow with an apple balanced upon her head, her gaze drifting somewhere beyond us. Even though the figures are unmistakably modern, mythology and religion creep beneath the scene like roots under the grass.

The apple on Kühlenthal’s head draws me in. It is absurd, theatrical, almost humorous. But apples carry stories with them. Suddenly we are in the Garden of Eden, among temptation, desire and forbidden knowledge. Then elsewhere: with folk hero William Tell, who shot an apple off his son’s head; beneath Isaac Newton’s legendary apple tree; or in Avalon, the mythical Isle of Apples where King Arthur journeys towards death and rebirth.

Kühlenthal herself becomes curiously unknowable within this web of references. Her birth name, Dorothy, recalls Saint Dorothy, the martyr associated with apples and heavenly gardens, while the Madonna lilies evoke Renaissance paintings depicting the Annunciation. Norah, lover of both Christine and Charlie, kneels with an offering in hand like a votary or angelic messenger. The scene slips between friendship, romance, devotion and performance, imagining love as something fluid, mythic and expansive: capable of transforming an afternoon beneath an apple tree into an entire emotional universe.

Perhaps that lingering enchantment carries with it a sense of transience. After marrying the painter John Nash in 1918, Kühlenthal’s own artistic ambitions gradually receded, a withdrawal also conditioned by the worsening glaucoma that eventually impaired her sight. Looking at The Picnic now, I cannot help but wonder what British art lost the moment Kühlenthal laid down her paintbrush.

^{The Picnic was bequeathed by Ronald Blythe in 2024 and is included in a new collection display, Living Gardens, opening on 15 June.}

^{Jon King is an author, curator and art historian based in London.}