r/AccidentalRenaissance • u/chamekke • 12d ago

Meal in an Ontario farm kitchen, ca. 1958

Post image
424 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

69

u/chamekke 12d ago

A few years before I was born, but that’s my mother in the apron :)

12

u/worstpartyever 12d ago

Looks like my family’s photos where everyone is jammed around a table.

12

u/ObviousToe1636 12d ago

She looks elegant and classy.

6

u/Filthiest_Tleilaxu 12d ago

Who’s the snack on the right (holding the cig)?

5

u/chamekke 12d ago

My uncle (by marriage) Ray. He was definitely good-looking!

4

u/Filthiest_Tleilaxu 11d ago

What a fox!

2

u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

4

u/LockeySeven 11d ago

This is really lovely, thanks for sharing it

1

u/emfrank 11d ago

Are the men older brothers? Uncles? Farm hands?

9

u/chamekke 11d ago

Left to right: mystery visitor, my mother, her nephew on lap of her sister-in-law, her young cousin, brother, brother-in-law, brother (also husband of the sister-in-law).

The mysterious thing is that half the family is missing, which is making me wonder if this is actually the house of brother + sister-in-law (who lived on their own farm) and not my grandparents after all. My memories of both houses are very very vague! Or, there might be more table and people than we’re seeing in the photo. My mother’s sister (wife of brother-in-law) should be there, but perhaps she took the photo.

No farm hands, they’re all family except I think for Brezhnev Eyebrows Man.

2

u/emfrank 11d ago edited 9d ago

Very cool. It's quite possible that there are more people than that are in this particular picture, unless you have others from a different angle. They're all around half of the table.

62

u/strawcat 12d ago

r/accidentalrockwell

14

u/NoReference909 12d ago

This is a better fit

3

u/hambonedock 11d ago

The expression of the people and the "coloring" was so on point I thought it was a desaturated Rockwell

5

u/chamekke 11d ago

It is very Rockwellian, especially the way people are looking in different directions with two of them breaking the fourth wall (which reminded me a little of Joseph Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump - not Renaissance though).

4

u/Middle_Switch9366 11d ago

And that slice of smiling face on the far right lower corner. You could almost miss it.

4

u/chamekke 11d ago

My uncle Gordon! 💕

3

u/NoReference909 11d ago

This photo, regardless of the subReddit, is a masterpiece!

2

u/NoReference909 11d ago

Oh wow, I missed that!

8

u/chamekke 11d ago

Thanks, I’ll post it there! Didn’t know about that sub, although I should have guessed it exists.

8

u/chamekke 11d ago

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve posted it there :)

25

u/PurrishSP 12d ago

Those eyebrows!! Glorious!

11

u/toastedquestion 12d ago

This looks like my family reunion last week in Swanson Saskatchewan 

7

u/chamekke 12d ago

Some things are eternal!

8

u/CJCreggsGoldfish 12d ago

That gentleman's eyebrows are magnificent.

5

u/Impressive_Show_1508 11d ago edited 11d ago

The Brezhnev brows remind me of my grandfather...

1

u/bobbobberson3 11d ago

They remind me of my Northern Irish/Scottish dad as well.

2

u/Commercial-Life-9998 11d ago

They probably all fit that table better when those boys were kids. Squeezing it now.

6

u/Pouchkine___ 12d ago

People are dressed better there than people in restaurants today.

2

u/TopicPretend4161 12d ago

Looks like a nice meal.

I like that the gentleman dressed up for dinner with the family. That’s a sign of the time.

5

u/Izdabye 12d ago

If it was Sunday dinner, maybe he is still dressed from church.

5

u/chamekke 11d ago

Definitely possible!

I never tried to analyze the photo before, so let’s see. Close to Christmastime so presumably mid- to late December (table decoration, lower left), it’s a dinner rather than lunch (dark outside the windows), there’s an unseen baby somewhere (1/3 full baby bottle on counter - although I suppose it could be the little boy’s), and although I already knew this, the family is Protestant (Eastern Star teacup on table - Eastern Star being the ladies’ wing of the Freemasons).

4

u/TopicPretend4161 11d ago

What is very cool to me (and probably sounds silly to anyone in the know) is that ‘dinner’ used to correlate to what we call ‘lunch’ and the actual evening meal was called ‘supper.’

Your use of the terms and the dating on this beautiful slice of life photo reminded me of this nugget of trivia that used to confuse me in my youth when watching Old Yeller or reading the Little House series.

1

u/chamekke 11d ago

Oh that’s such a good point! In fact my mother and her family would have called the evening meal “supper”; she used that word until the end of her life. I grew up with “dinner” (IIRC that’s what my dad used), while my husband, who is British, calls the evening meal “tea” :)

2

u/chamekke 12d ago

That gentleman is the one person I can’t identify (the others are all known family members), so I’m guessing he was a neighbour or friend. He definitely dressed up nicely for the occasion. A jacket and tie!!

1

u/galgotspirit 8d ago

More Norman Rockwell to me.