Word: harnett
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, from the evidence of the De Gustibus show, it appeared that popular art appreciation in the U.S. was lagging about 60 years behind contemporary U.S. artists. Visitors to the exhibit picked William M. Harnett's morning-clear still life, Old Models (1892), as their favorite painting in the show, and gave second place to Thomas Hovenden's Breaking the Home Ties (1890), a teary scene of family parting complete with sad-eyed Rover. The 1890s were voted the favorite decade, the 1880s next, and the 1930s (where the modernist vote was massed) third...
There was nothing wrong with what the public liked. Old Models was painted with super-photographic realism and depth perception, qualities in Harnett which experts acknowledge and admire too. More than one visitor absently tried to flick the dust off its violin. Breaking the Home Ties, though as bluntly aimed to draw tears as a punch in the eye, is nevertheless an expertly painted scene of the young man's departure for the big city. When first shown, at Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893, visitors wore out three carpets in the rush to admire...
Humanized Mechanization. The only U.S. artist to rival Peale's mastery of still life was an Irishman named William M. Harnett. As sickly as Peale, Harnett was also dirt-poor to start with, took to painting still lifes because he could not afford live models. He made his dead models-rabbits, books, fruit, paper money-so convincing that guards were once posted to protect his canvases from clutching gallerygoers...
...Harnett's realism created a short-lived fashion; his prices rose to $2,000 a picture before he died in 1892, then dropped abruptly. A bachelor recluse, he is known to have granted only one interview, in the course of which he made a puzzling statement: "I do not closely imitate nature...
...Author Harnett Kane of New Orleans told of Louisiana elections held in white bars or bordellos, which no Negro dared enter. He recalled Huey Long's remark after the Legislature repealed Louisiana's poll tax in 1934: "The white primary will take care of the nigger...