William Michael Harnett

1848 - 1892 • American • Painter • Trompe l'oeil

"I want my models to have the mellowness of age ... the rich effect that age and usage gives." - William Michael Harnett

Harnett became the most successful TROMPE L'OEIL painter of STILL LIFES in America. It is written that he began painting objects because he could not afford human models, but that does not explain why, with financial as well as artistic success, he continued to paint them. He invested these things, his "models," with personality or, perhaps, pried loose the character they had accumulated, through usage, over time. It has been suggested that we look at Harnett's subjects within the context of the materialism of America's Gilded Age, but it is well to keep in mind that it was also a time when Americans were nostalgic for the antebellum past, which Harnett's paintings may also conjure up. The objects he arranged for display were resolutely masculine: thick, old leather books; money; newspapers; and pipes, often with still-glowing embers in their bowls. The best -known work is After the Hunt ( 1885 ), a large, almost 6-foot-high arrangement of a battered old hat, hunting horn, powder horn, rifle, dead hare and birds, and other objects that are nailed on a wooden door with beautiful brass hinges, all darkened, burnished, and mellowed by time. After studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy in New York, Harnett spent four years studying in Munich.