Antoine Vollon's Mound of Butter is so delightfully creamy it begs onlookers to take a dollop to spread on toast.

Unfortunately, this beauty expired about a century and a half ago. In light of the food poisoning risk, hungry visitors to the National Gallery sample this aged delicacy at their own risk. Far more appetizing than Margaret Harrison’s Good Enough to Eat (unless a scantily-clad-lady-burger is your cup of tea), this still-life represents us all. It’s an artistic ode to the six year olds who snuck butter by the spoonful without qualms and to all us older folks who enjoy the free bread and butter more than the main course. And if modern butter (we’re not talking Crisco here, either) could measure up to Vollon's fatty masterpiece, we’d probably be eating a good unadulterated helping with every meal. Whoever said your pomegranate didn’t need a generous layer of 19th century butter?

To make Mound of Butter even more delectable, think of the times. Vollon grew up with modern butter’s more attractive older cousin, the heavenly home-churned affair sold by farmers and colored naturally from the cows’ diet of carotene-rich produce. Vollon was often compared to Chardin and was influenced heavily by the Dutch masters, though Rembrandt never painted anything half so appetizing. Vollon’s secret? He often mixed his own paints, so it's likely the paint itself was combined with butter.

Critics wonder if the layered brushstrokes could be a response to Impressionism, but it’s not a stretch to say Vollon could have painted this mystical condiment just for the heck of it. After all, this is the man who once painted A Monkey Frying Eggs. The real question remains, where can we get butter as perfect as Vollon’s? Are we not deserving? In the words of Asa Dunbar, the catalyst of Harvard’s Great Butter Rebellion of 1766, “Behold our butter stinketh! Give us therefore butter that stinketh not!”