The London EDITION and The Cultivist built their Creative Table lunch as a Dutch Golden Age banquet, with gourds and dahlias between the booths, a portrait studio built around his canvas and his painting at every plate

Pumpkins and squash sat around silver bowls of grapes and apples, spread on draped peach linen along the ledges between the booths. Above them, framed paintings and photographs covered the walls edge to edge, all the way up to the ceiling. By the windows, a portrait studio brought one of George Rouy’s paintings to life, where guests stepped in for photos.

A Dutch Golden Age banquet at The London EDITION

Frieze London and Frieze Masters filled Regent’s Park from October 14 to 18, with nearly 300 galleries from 48 countries, and the rest of the city spent the week feeding everyone who came for them.

The London EDITION and The Cultivist held the lunch on a Thursday in October for George Rouy, the British painter. The Creative Table, a dining series from EDITION Hotels, pairs an artist with each big date on the art calendar. After London, it goes to Art Week Tokyo with Perrotin and the French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, then to Art Basel Miami Beach with Creative Time, the New York public art nonprofit. Rouy and the EDITION team designed the menu around 17th-century banquet paintings. Guests started with Fig Leaf Negronis and Autumn Bellinis, then Colchester Pyefleet oysters and malted sourdough with Marmite butter, all set out on wooden boards. Honey-glazed Devon chicken came next, and lunch ended on Baron Bigod, Cashel Blue and Montgomery Cheddar with quince jam and grapes.

For the London stop, they picked a painter from Kent. Rouy was born in Sittingbourne in 1994 and paints out of a former warehouse in Faversham, and when he joined Hauser & Wirth in 2024 he was the youngest artist on its roster. Hannah Barry, who gave him his first show at her London gallery in 2018, was at the lunch, and so was PJ Harvey. Over lunch, Rouy sat in conversation with Nikolaj Schultz, the Danish sociologist whose book Land Sickness follows a man who flees a Paris heatwave and finds there’s nowhere left to hide from the climate crisis.

Still life, with George Rouy

The menu borrowed from what the Dutch called the banketje, or banquet piece. In 1630s Haarlem, Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda painted the same table again and again: oysters on pewter plates, a half-peeled lemon, a tipped-over glass and a cut pie. By the 1640s, Jan Davidsz de Heem was piling on lobsters, grapes and silver in a showier style known as pronkstilleven.

Those painters put the table into the painting, down to the empty oyster shells. At Berners Tavern, the painting also went onto the table, with Rouy’s In Vitro printed on every napkin. Guests spent the afternoon wiping their mouths with a George Rouy.