(1848–1892)
Born in County Cork, Ireland, William Michael Harnett came to Philadelphia with his family around 1849. He began his career as an engraver, and during the 1860s and 1870s, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy, National Academy of Design, and Cooper Union. He traveled to Europe in 1880, studying the Dutch Old Masters and settling in Munich. Following his success at the Paris Salon of 1885, Harnett returned to the United States in 1886 and achieved considerable renown before his early death in 1892.
Trompe-l’oeil painting, which aims to “fool the eye,” was little practiced in America until William Harnett took up the style around 1876 and made it an enduring feature of late nineteenth-century visual culture. Looking back to seventeenth-century Dutch painting, Harnett introduced many subjects that had seldom or never entered American still lifes, including letter racks, books, newspapers, money, musical instruments, and hanging game. His marvelously illusionistic technique also raised new questions for his viewers about the truth of appearances and the vanity of human achievements.
Although certainly influenced by the burgeoning consumer culture of the Gilded Age, Harnett’s depictions of man-made objects often evoke a quieter, more private world of simple masculine pleasures. Perhaps the best example of this type is the smoking picture, with which Harnett established himself in the late 1870s. The implements of that favorite pastime were presented in loving detail, and as the tactility of the illusionism excited his senses, many a man must have reached for his own pipe. While still lifes of fruit and flowers were usually hung in the dining room and parlor, Harnett’s pipe-and-tobacco paintings clearly belonged in the study, where men would retreat for an after-dinner smoke.
