(1856–1931)
Born in Sadsbury Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, Chalfant moved with his family in 1861 to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and followed his father’s trade as a cabinetmaker. By the 1880s, Chalfant was living in Wilmington, Delaware, which would remain his home for the rest of his life. By 1883 Chalfant opened a studio as an artist, and he appears to have begun his artistic career as a landscape painter before switching to still-life painting by 1885. Chalfant is best known for his trompe l’oeil paintings, inspired by the work of William Michael Harnett (1848–1892). Harnett’s return to New York City in 1886, after six years of studying abroad in Munich, brought attention to trompe l’oeil effects.
Harnett’s immense impact on Chalfant can be seen in Chalfant’s Gunner’s Outfit and Game, 1886 (location unknown) and After the Hunt, 1888 (location unknown, though documented in photographs) which takes the title from Harnett’s famous work. Among Chalfant’s other quite marvelous still lifes are four of violins, again based on Harnett’s The Old Violin, now in the National Gallery in Washington. Chalfant also painted at least one currency painting in imitation of Harnett’s pictures of paper bills. Chalfant’s several paintings of postage stamps, where he paired the real items with the paintings, shows his own individual adaptation of the style. A Wilmington newspaper of January 5, 1885, noted that “Mr. Chalfant is a student in that school of art of which Harnet [sic] is a recognized master.”
The still-life period of Chalfant’s life ended when Alfred Corning Clark, a important New York collector, sponsored his travel abroad to study in Paris at the Académie Julian in 1890. His studies focused on the human figure, and after he returned from over a year and half in Paris, he became a master of genre paintings, often depicting children, elderly artisans at work, and male figures in historical costumes.
