released with a warning and the paintings were returned.[22] Harnett never painted money again and died four years later, almost universally recognised as America’s finest still-life painter.
This painting that created such a turmoil was a prime example of the excruciating detail Harnett created when rendering ordinary objects to a degree of accuracy that people felt the need to reach out and touch the painting’s surface. Some viewers of Still-life – Five Dollar Bill tried to peel the bill off the wood tabletop with their fingernails until it was hung out of reach. The lines of the engraving tools are shown as are the slightly rolled edges of the tears caused by wear. As the wrinkles in the paper’s surface rise and fall, so does the image giving the illusion that there is actually space between the bill and the grainy wood surface. The signatures, the tiny writing and age-worn seals; everything is there giving a power to that crumpled slip of paper money it never had in reality.
By 1886, William Harnett had built up a considerable reputation as a trompe-l’œil, or ‘fool the eye’, painter. Sadly, his active career as an artist lasted only sixteen years from 1876 to 1892. In that time, he managed to produce about five hundred paintings, many of which have been lost; an even greater number have been forged and some achieved major recognition in collections around the world. Over that period of sixteen years he was either ignored, or excoriated by the art critics and taste-makers. He won no medals and received no prize awards from prestigious New York or Philadelphia academies. Only after his untimely death at the age of forty-four were his paintings held up as examples of excellence – and then only for a short time – until Impressionists from Europe waded ashore and he slipped from the scene for almost fifty years of obscurity.
Harnett was actually upholding a tradition in the United States begun in the eighteenth century with miniature painters and ‘Illusionists’ by the likes of Raphaelle Peale, his brother Rembrandt and his father Charles Wilson Peale. They called their work ‘deceptions’. One of their most famous collaborations is titled Catalogue for the Use of the Room, a Deception (1817). This painting by Charles Wilson Peale shows full-length portraits of Raphaelle and Titan Ramsey Peale mounting a flight of stairs framed by a real doorway and step.
The Peales in their time were cast in the same mould as ‘mechanics’ who slavishly copied nature without bringing a moral uplift or dramatic statement to the subject. These ‘Illusionists’ with their ‘deceptions’ fell into the pit of ‘marginalisation.’ Still-life painting was considered the lowest rank in the classifications established by the academies back in the eighteenth century. In his essay, “Sordid Mechanics” and “Monkey Talents” – The Illusionistic Tradition, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr writes:
“Marginality was arguably the most essential and distinctive condition of the production of trompe-l’œil painting… what illusionistic painters had most in common was not only their language of style, but their marginal artistic existence: the loneliness, alienation, and poverty that were the social, artistic and economic costs of the undertaking of illusionistic still-life painting. The recurrence of those conditions from Raphaelle Peale to Harnett was, perhaps, the truest tradition of illusionism.”[23]
Raphaelle Peale started out as a portrait artist, but achieved little patronage in Philadelphia. He tried cutting profiles with a patented ‘physiognotrace’ machine, but his reduction in circumstances sent him into alcoholism, delirium tremens and crippling gout that put him on crutches. He eventually turned to still-lifes, which at that time were considered fodder fit only for amateurs. Regardless, his work was displayed at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts from 1814 to 1818. Peale’s bad habits plus arsenic and mercury poisoning from helping out with taxidermy exhibits in his father’s museum added to a night of heavy drinking, finally killed him on 25 March 1825.
The same prejudice against still-life painting in general and the rigours of illusionism in particular dogged William Harnett as well as causing myopia from that close work under flickering gaslight. He was crippled from rheumatism while working over the cramped details in an often chilly room when he could not afford to heat it. His clothes were clean but ‘antique’ in cut.
Yet, he produced this incredible bounty of work and scholars have filled books with psychological interpretations and picked over into fragments what little documentation of his life exists. His genius is apparent once cut free from the Victorian imposition of romantic values and motivations. Buried in those myriad of details and textures lies his own poetry. For eighteen years, it rang in his ears only.
William Michael Harnett was born on 10 August 1848 in Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland to William Harnett, a shoemaker, and Honora (known as “Hannah”) Holland, a seamstress, He had an older brother, Patrick, who also became a shoemaker, and two younger sisters, Anne and Ella, who followed their mother into the seamstress trade. So it was in Victorian Ireland that the older brother followed father into the business and the younger brother got the education. The daughters worked for their dowries so they would have some value when married off; but that was in the Old Country. In 1849, the Harnetts packed up and emigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A natural talent for drawing must have been revealed in his formative years because in 1866 he entered the antique class at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. There, he laboured over drawing from casts, graduating from sketching bits of the human body up to the full body casts that were required before entering the still-life classes. In 1864 his father had drowned in the Delaware River and Harnett had to work and support his mother and siblings while going to school. Demonstrating his drawing skills, he was able to apprentice himself to the engraving trade, a practical application of his skills. As an apprentice, he began with wood, graduated to copper and steel, and was finally promoted to engraving silver flatware. At the age of twenty he moved to New York in 1869 and worked for the firms Tiffany & Company and Wood & Hughes scribing monograms. It was at the latter firm where he met his lifelong friend William Ignatius Blemly. During their acquaintance, Harnett presented a number of engraved gifts to Blemly that have survived to reveal his gift for skilfully incorporating the decorative motifs of the time with his burin onto everyday objects such as matchboxes and napkin rings.
Engraving is a nervous, highly controlled art form. A slip with the steel tool on the mirror surface of sterling silver cannot be erased or painted over. Success demands an artisan-craftsman frame of mind to initiate the cut, vary the depth and conclude the line in a single modulated stroke. It is also a tedious art form if the design must be repetitiously applied, as it was with silver eating utensils. Another factor was the design, which might have come from a supplied template rather than his own imagination. To extend his creativity, Harnett began studying painting at New York’s Cooper Union Institute and the New York Academy of Design at night. After a day at his engraver’s bench, the painting classes must have seemed relaxing.
William Michael Harnett, Job Lot Cheap, 1878.
Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 91.4 cm.
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
William Michael Harnett, After the Hunt, 1885.
Oil on canvas, 181.6 × 123.2 cm.
Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, Mildred Anna Williams Collection.
William Michael Harnett, After the Hunt, 1883.
Oil on canvas, 133.3 × 91.4 cm.
Colombus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, bequest of Francis C. Sessions.
William Michael Harnett, For Sunday’s Dinner, 1888.
Oil on canvas, 94.3 × 53.6 cm.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
The class