William M. Harnett
Hanging on the wall on the other side of the museum gallery you see a rough wooden plank with envelopes and ticket stubs thumbtacked to it. You walk closer and notice that the plank is scarred and written on; someone has marked an "x" in chalk in one corner and done some doodling and arithmetic in pencil in another. You step up to read the exhibition label, and you do a doubletake. This is not a wooden board with objects tacked to it; it's not even three-dimensional. It's an oil on canvas painting. Your eye has been fooled.
The American master of trompe l'oeil (or "fool the eye") painting was William Harnett. Destined to become the most well-known still life painter in late 19th-century America, William Michael Harnett was born in Clonakilty, Ireland, on August 10, 1848. His father, also named William, was a shoemaker; his mother, Honora (called Hannah), was a seamstress. Young William was born as the Potato Famine ravaged Ireland. During his infancy the family joined hundreds of thousands of their compatriots and fled to America.
William and Hannah Harnett arrived in Philadelphia sometime around 1849 with their toddler son Patrick and baby William. They were working class Irish Catholics in a Protestant, patrician city. By the early 1860s William was selling newspapers and running errands to help support the family, which had grown to include sisters Margaret, Ella, and Anne. Young William was about 16 when his father drowned in the Delaware River, leaving Hannah with two teenaged sons and three daughters under the age of 12.
In 1865 William Harnett trained as an engraver, working on steel, copper, wood, and silver. A year later he enrolled in evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1868 William Harnett became a U.S. citizen.
In 1869 Harnett moved to New York City and supported himself by engraving monograms and patterns on flatware. While living in New York he studied first at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and later at the National Academy of Design. In September 1874, at the age of 26, Harnett completed his first known oil painting. Even this first work, Paint Tube and Grapes, illustrates his interest in juxtaposing natural and manmade objects: a small bunch of grapes and a tube of oil paint rest on a wooden cigar box. Harnett kept painting and began to exhibit his work. Within a year he quit his job as an engraver and began to paint fulltime.
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