The Carrot in Fine Art

Boy Holding a Carrot - 1738
Francois Boucher
1703-1770
• Pastel on buff paper
• Helen Regenstein Collection
• The Art Institute of Chicago

Unknown Artist
Unknown artist

Carrots originated in Afghanistan and possibly northern Iran and Pakistan.


Daucus carota sativa


We grow:
Artist (Heavy Nantes)
Bolero (Heavy Nantes)
Napoli (Early Nantes)
Nelson (Early Nantes) &
Sugarsnax (Imperator)


The carrot was brought to by colonists to the New World, where it escaped into the wild and became Queen Anne's Lace.

Queen Anne's Lace is wild carrot which interpollinates readily with carrot and occurs in disturbed ecological areas (such as roadsides and vacant lots) all around the world in temperate regions with adequate moisture.

Les Pettits Mordent Des Carottes - Paul Gavarni 1804-66

There is a round variety of carrot about the size of a beet. They taste the same as regular carrots.



Unknown artist

Availability: Mid-July through October

Days to Maturity: 70-80 days

Approximate Yield per 10 feet of row: 10 pounds
Per Person Requirements:
Fresh: 5-10 feet of row
Preservation: 10-15 feet of row

Weights:
1 bushel (without tops) = 50 pounds
= 32-40 pints frozen
= 17-25 quarts canned

2 1/2 pounds fresh = 2 pints frozen; (without tops) = 1 quart canned


We enjoy digging our carrots in November, December and January to have a fresh treat when there is snow n the ground. By covering the carrot bed with a firm layer of straw and then protecting this with a sheet of plastic, the carrots stay sound through the winter. Our parsnip bed receives this same treatment.


Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, was not very fond of carrots. Neither is Ping.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Putting by Carrots in March
  .  
 

Carrot Facts

arrots are native to Afghanistan. Red, black yellow, white, purple - these were the colors that carrots started out with. Everything but orange.

Carrots were first cultivated in Afghanistan in the 7th century, and they started with yellow flesh and a purple exterior.

It was the Dutch who developed the orange carrot, and the French in the 17th who most likely developed the elongated carrot, ancestor of the ones we eat today.

The English brought the carrot to the New World. There were originally red, purple and black varieties of carrots that contained anthocyanin pigments.

The yellow, and eventually orange varieties of carrots were developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, they contain no anthocyanin pigments, but rather carotenoids which are responsible for the yellow and orange color.

Today there are new red and purple carrot varieties available that contain anthocyanin pigments.

Gerrit Dou 1613-1675
Woman peeling carrot
Oil on wood
Staatliches Museum, Schwerin


"Carrot" is the common name for some members of the Umbelliferae, a family (also called the parsley family) of chiefly biennial or perennial herbs of north temperate regions.

Most are characterized by aromatic foliage, a dry fruit that splits when mature, and an umbellate inflorescence (a type of flattened flower cluster in which the stems of the small florets arise from the same point, like an umbrella).

The seeds or leaves of many of these herbs have been used for centuries for seasoning or as greens (e.g., angelica, anise, caraway, chervil, coriander, cumin, dill, fennel, lovage, and parsley). The carrot, celery, and parsnip are vegetables of commercial importance.

P Blume, Vegetable Dinner, 1927
Oil: 64 x 76 cm
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Washington DC



 


 

The common garden carrot (Daucus carota sativa) is a root crop, probably derived from some variety of the wild carrot (or Queen Anne's lace). In antiquity several types of carrot were grown as medicinals, and in Europe carrots have long been grown for use in soups and stews. The custom of eating carrots raw as a salad has become widespread in the 20th cent. Carrots are a rich source of carotene (vitamin A), especially when they are cooked.

Several types of carrot have also been cultivated since ancient times as aromatic plants. Some are still planted as fragrant garden ornamentals, such as the button snakeroot and sweet cicely. A few members of the Umbelliferae produce lethal poison; it was one of these, the poison hemlock, that Socrates was compelled to take. The water hemlock is also poisonous. Carrots are classified in the division Magnoliophyta, class Magnoliopsida, order Umbellales, family Umbelliferae.




 


Quirijn van Brekelenkam (1653)
Man spinning and Woman scrubbing carrots.
arrots are a very old plant.

Fossil records show that fossil pollen of 55 million years ago belonging to the carrot family. The wild carrot, from which all cultivated carrots have come, is a noxious weedy plant. It was first used 5,000 years ago in Afghanistan as a pale, black, red, green, or purple root.

The carrots enjoyed by the early Romans were yellow or white. The familiar orange carrot was not known until the 1500s in Holland when patriotic farmers bred the carrot to grow in the color of the House of Orange by crossing the yellow and the red carrots, thus giving us the vegetable that is rich in carotene.



 

 

The Greeks called the carrot "philtron' and considered it to be a 'love medicine' and it was touted as an aphrodisiac. China, India and Japan had established the use of carrots as a staple by the 13th century, spreading on to Europe and England where they were valued no only as food, but the fragrant leaves were used to decorate and also worn on hats and clothing.

The carrots that we see in the store are far removed from what they were a mere 70 years ago. They have been hybridized to produce the short, wide, blunt root that makes a superior product without the waste of the long tapered root of its ancestors.

Carrots are considered to be 'the best' vegetable for balanced nutrition. Many treatments for chronic disease such as cancer and arthritis use the regular consumption of large quantities of carrot juice as an important part of the treatment protocol. Carrots are famous for their high vitamin A content. They are also rich in vitamin C.




  Consumption

Outside the US and Canada which consume Imperator type (long, thin) carrots, the rest of the world consumes shorter, thicker-rooted conical (Danvers or Chantenay type) and cylindrical (Nantes) carrots.

Carrots are worth approximately $300 million per year to US growers, with over half the production in California. Nutrition * Carrots provide 30% of the vitamin A in the US diet.

Vitamin A is synthesized in the human metabolism by the breakdown of carotenes, the orange pigments in carrot roots. Vitamin A itself occurs in meat, liver, eggs, milk, and other animal products.


Over-consumption of vitamin A can be toxic to humans but over-consumption of carotenes is never toxic since carotene breakdown is well-controlled. Over-consumption of carotenes or carrots can give the skin an orange tone but this is not harmful.

 Quiringh Gerritsz van Brekelenkam,
The Vegetable Stall 1665
Canvas: 47.0 x 38.1 Oil on oak panel

 

Levi Wells Prentice (1851-1935)
Still Life with Cantaloupe, Tomatoes, and Carrots
Oil on canvas 12 x 16 inches
Vitamin A deficiency is a significant world problem, especially in the developing world. The magnitude of human suffering from Vitamin A deficiency is comparable to that of protein deficiency and second only to caloric deficiency.

One crop of high-carotene carrots (twice the US carotene content) on one square meter of land produces enough carotene to provide an adult with all the vitamin A needed in a year.



Domestication of carrots took the following path:

900 - 1000 AD: Purple and yellow carrots had been spread from Afghanistan to the eastern Mediterranean.

1300s: Purple and yellow carrots in western Europe and China

1600s: Yellow carrots in Japan

1700s: In addition to purple and yellow, white carrots were reported in Europe with an orange type first reported in The Netherlands and adjoining regions


Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Spring, 1565
Pen and brown ink; contours indented for transfer; 22 x 29 cm; Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna




Quirin Gerritz van Brekelenkam
c1640s - 1668

Family seated round a kitchen fire
Today: Orange carrots predominate world-wide although some white types persist in western and eastern Europe (for livestock), some red (not orange) in Japan, some yellow and purple in the Mideast, and some purple, yellow, and red from Turkey to India and China




If you have the good fortune of having a garden plot, carrots will keep in the ground all winter.

Otherwise, they can be stored in dry sand in a "'root cellar," which is, for city folk, a cool dark place set aside for winter storage of root crops.




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