Word: harnett
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...SOME DECADES NOW, THE eye-fooler William Harnett (1848-92) has been one of the most popular American 19th century painters. Everyone relishes the stories about his gee-whiz illusionistic skills and how they mesmerized Americans at the dawn of the photographic age a century ago, people less drenched in images and less blase about them than we. "So real is it," wrote a Cincinnati journalist in 1886 about a Harnett called The Old Violin, that a special guard "has been detailed to stand beside the picture and suppress any attempts to take down the fiddle...
...even the resources of the Metropolitan Museum of Art can turn Harnett into one of the best American artists of his time. This is not for lack of trying. The Met's Harnett show, which will travel to Fort Worth and San Francisco before finishing at the National Gallery in Washington in the spring of 1993, marks the 100th anniversary of his death and contains most of his known work...
...Harnett's life is slim pickings for the biographer. The son of an immigrant Irish shoemaker from Cork, he lived in Philadelphia, worked in New York City as a journeyman artist and engraver, studied briefly in Munich, showed his pictures in beer halls as well as in art galleries, and died of kidney failure at the age of 44 without leaving a single recorded comment on his art or, indeed, on anything else, beyond declaring that "I endeavour to make the composition tell a story." But one may be fairly sure that if his ghost saw the Met's catalog...
...terms without loading it with significance. All his paintings in the show -- with one exception, an inertly sentimental picture of a small black boy in a paper hat -- are still lifes. He was not interested in figures and had no feel for the human face. The best of Harnett is, so to speak, the weak populist end of the best strain in 19th century American art: its adherence to pragmatic, empirical vision, to art as an instrument of the world's measurement. (The great figures in this are Audubon, Eakins and Homer...
...early paintings, of the 1870s, are stiff, naive and curiously old- fashioned; they are almost exactly like the work that Raphaelle Peale, America's first still-life artist, had been doing around 1815. But Harnett hit his stride in the 1880s, and in fact the most beautiful painting in this show, The Artist's Letter Rack, dates from 1879: an image of letters, visiting cards and a theater ticket, the meager index of an artist's social life, held by a crisscrossed square of pink tape to an unvarnished pine board. Everything is actual size, and the flatness...