Exquisite Deception: The Trompe l'Oeil of William Harnett

William Harnett, The Old Violin

“A painting has been added to the Art Gallery, which has created a furor.

Visitors will need no guide post, they will find it by following the crowd.”

— Cincinnati newspapers, 1886

In the days before David Blaine, this was as close to public spectacles of mesmerizing sorcery as people could get. If anything, the newspapers understated the effect of Harnett's painting.

Paul Staiti, in his essay entitled "Con Artists: Harnett, Haberle, and Their American Accomplices," says that "Harnett's painting The Old Violin so agitated and attracted crowds at the thirteenth Cincinnati Industrial Exposition in 1886 that a policeman was detailed to stand beside the picture and prevent viewers from trying to take down its fiddle and bow."

Besides his technical wizardry, William Harnett was a recognized master of composition. Each element in The Old Violin was positioned to achieve a precise balance. An interesting exercise is to block out any element, such as the door handle, with our hand. It's immediately apparent that each element was deliberately composed so as to achieve balance and order, and that not one item is superfluous to the overall composition.

John F. Peto, Old Violin

Thanks to a widely distributed chromolithograph, The Old Violin would fast become an icon of American art, inspiring a group of illusionist painters (including John F. Peto) with his crisp, linear style.

William Harnett, Music and Good Luck

The shallow space created by filling the entire canvas with an impenetrable door was essential to the trompe l'oeil effect. Harnett presented the objects directly before the viewer, preventing the eye from moving beyond and into the work, in direct refutation of Alberti's "window pane." Alberti would famously bid us stare through the picture plane, at an illusory world of space behind the canvas. His picture plane is an imaginary window in the foreground, with all the action taking place behind this plane. This was the remarkable and revolutionary idea that sparked Renaissance painters to adopt linear perspective.


Harnett reverses this heirarchy of space. Instead, he has all the action appear to happen in front of the picture plane. Through technical sleight-of-hand, he pushes the picture plane itself backwards, and then projects objects forward so that they appear to occupy our space.

detail of torn shreds of sheet music, Alan Carroll

Harnett, the undisputed master of illusionism, made the violin and sheet music the central images of his painting. The music sheet is a favorite visual trope that recurs regularly in Harnett's paintings. I had the opportunity to try my hand at painting music sheets myself recently (above), and understand the challenges that it entails.

John F. Peto, For the Track

Other artists would try to copy Harnett's compositional arrangements, with varying success. John F. Peto's For the Track makes an interesting comparison. Compositionally inferior, it was also technically the weaker painting. Peto's crude brushstrokes make us constantly aware of the presence of the artist, ruining any illusory effect.

John F. Peto, For the Track (detail)

Unlike Harnett's structured, almost spare arrangement, Peto's cluttered canvas, with objects vying for our attention, confuses the viewer and appears chaotic. 

Details from Harnett's "The Old Violin"

Typical of the best examples of trompe l'oeil, there are virtually no signs of brushwork. Harnett developed his own custom tools and techniques to help create his details -  the hinges, news clipping, twine, and stamp. In the details from the National Gallery site (above), we can see from left to right:

• To create the newspaper clipping, Harnett first painted narrow blocks of thinned black paint over a white ground. With the dark paint still wet, he used a tiny pointed instrument to trace lines through it, revealing the white underlayer and creating a "typeface" that looked real to the viewer, but was in fact illegible.
• The hinges were produced in a fairly simple, two-step process. Harnett first added either sand or coarsely ground pigment to brown paint to make a rough underlayer. For the rusty highlights, he pulled a dry brush, touched with orange paint, over the brown surface.
• Harnett used bright highlights on the metal ring and a soft circular shadow on the door to lift the ring off the canvas.
• The thin twine loop holding the violin is true testament to Harnett's painstaking methods. It is only five inches long, and the artist tweaked hundreds of fine lines in the loop's wet paint with a needlelike tool, producing the coarse-textured appearance.
• For the cancelled stamp, Harnett first painted a light square with a serrated border, giving each tooth its own delicate highlights and shadow. He then applied a thin layer of brown paint, scraping it with a blunt stylus to make the crossed flags. Next, Harnett used a minute pointed tool to make the almost microscopic engraving lines. He painted the cancellation mark with black and then smudged the entire stamp with his finger. His fingerprint is still visible.

"William Harnett transformed still-life painting in America when he tipped the picture plane on end, hanging objects on a rough-hewn door rather than placing them on the customary table top. Harnett's pictorial innovations—the vertical orientation, his choice of tactile objects, and his painstaking trompe l'oeil techniques—made him the most famous still-life painter in the last quarter of the nineteenth century," and arguably the inventor of the style called American Trompe l'Oeil.

Deer and Wildfowl, Adolphe Braun, 1865

Of course, as with any invention, he didn't just pluck the idea from the ether. There were precedents. In the 1880s Harnett spent six years in Europe, studying old master still-life painting. In Munich, he was exposed to the photographs by Adolphe Braun. Braun's flat, textured pictures of dead game, hunting implements, and horns suspended against a textured wall would have a profound effect on Harnett's work.

While most famous for his vertical still lifes of wild game, musical instruments, and paper ephemera, William Harnett is credited with introducing another, more controversial, subject to still life: money. 

Other artists had included currency in their paintings, but Harnett was the first to focus solely on paper bills and coins, making them look so real that in 1886 he was arrested for counterfeiting. New York law officers seized Five Dollar Bill from the saloon where it hung and demanded that Harnett hand over other "counterfeit" paintings. After viewing the painting, the judge advised that "the development and exercise of a talent so capable of mischief should not be encouraged." Harnett never painted money again.

Imitation, John Haberle (detail)

Harnett stopped making trompe l'oeil images of money, but John Haberle ignored warnings to "stop painting greenbacks" and made it his specialty. He neatly side-stepped accusations of forgery by simply titling his painting "Imitation." 

Five Rules of Trompe l'Oeil

1. The first and most important rule for painters of trompe l'oeil is that the object represented must be depicted actual size.

2. The shallower the space depicted, the more realistic the illusion. The most effective trompe l'oeil has always been a simple sheet of paper pinned to a board. As soon as the artist plays with deeper space (e.g. the space occupied by a musical instrument), the trick is not as effective. Our brains know that if it were a real musical instrument, our stereoscopic binocular vision would provide us with depth cues, also called parallax. Since this is just a painting, these cues are not present and we know we are being conned.

3. Hide those brushstrokes! Historically, trompe l'oeil was critically derided as being overly technical. Said to be merely virtuoso displays, they were dismissed as shallow egotism. But that was exactly the point! If it's to pass as reality, then it must be as smooth as a baby's butt.

4. Don't paint humans. Famous examples to the contrary by Mantegna and Veronese notwithstanding, objects that would in reality move about, should not be included in traditional trompe l'oeil. There's nothing like a smiling or waving human, frozen for eternity in a dry-mouthed grimmace, to ruin the effect of trompe l'oeil.

5. Don't cut the outline of objects with the frame. Objects in trompe l'oeil paintings must have their entire outline visible within the frame.

There are probably more rules, but I can't think of them right now.

Why is trompe l'oeil so popular?

The attraction of trompe l'oeil is the thrill of that magical moment where reality is suspended. The longer the viewer can be held in that suspended state, the greater the pleasure upon realizing the deception.

John Ruskin wrote of trompe l'oeil, "The mind derives its pleasure, not from the contemplation of a truth, but from the discovery of falsehood. . . . The degree of pleasure depends on the degree of difference and the perfection of the resemblance, not on the nature of the thing resembled."

Ruskin was right, says Staiti, that the pleasure of experiencing a painting by Harnett or Haberle is in "an expanded moment of passage from suspecting a picture is a deception to knowing a picture is a deception." The critical point of trompe l'oeil, he writes, is that "it is irony, not truth or beauty, that is triumphant. Paradox rules."

Canaletto and Superman

Westminster Bridge, by Canaletto (1746)

Canaletto is known to have used Camera Ottica to mechanically assist in creating his cityscapes of Venice, but closer study reveals that that wasn't the end of the story. He manipulated the perspective in his scenes, sometimes changing the vantage point and giving a more flattened and distant view. Pushing the stationpoint back gives the viewer a more panoramic and flattened picture plane.

I call it Superman Perspective. It’s the flattened way things would look if you could see detail from a thousand miles away. In his “Westminster Bridge” painting, we get the sense that Canaletto must have used a high-powered telescope to see his subject. There’s very little evidence of linear perspective in the arches under the bridge. The closer you are, the more distortion will be apparent. In reality, you’d have to swing your head around to take in this whole scene, and the bridge would appear to balloon towards you in the center. Canaletto has made the artistic choice to straighten the bridge ‘unnaturally’.

It’s more impersonal, but it depends upon your goal. Maybe, in the end, the telescopic view speaks volumes about Canaletto’s personality. Perhaps he wanted to see the world from a distance, to rise above the cacophony of human interactions. For someone like Caravaggio, on the other hand, human drama was clearly the very stuff of life. He'd have us sit right at the table in Supper at Emmaus, involving us directly in the conversation.

These cubes drawn in two-point perspective (above) illustrate my point. In A, on the left, the viewer is positioned a thousand miles away from the cube, viewing it as if with Superman’s supervision. The red orthogonals (lines drawn along receding parallel lines to the vanishing point) of the cube stretch out to some infinitely distant theoretical point on either side when presumably they would converge into Vanishing Points 1 and 2. The further away from the object we are, the further away the vanishing points are.

They closer we get to the object (or more accurately the picture plane), the closer to the centre line those Vanishing Points come. In B, on the right, we are so close to the cube that it’s sides have become completely distorted and are towering over us. You can see that the vanishing points (VP1 and VP2) are so close to the center line that they are visible within the frame. This is known in architectural draughting as “accelerated perspective,” because it gives an exaggerated sense of spatial depth.

In both these photos of the same vase from the Vanderbilt mansion in Rhode Island, the horizon line is level with the lion’s head. However, there’s a difference: we can tell that the camera was closer to the vase in the photo on the right. How do we know? The orthogonals on the right photo recede to vanishing points closer to the center line. This creates the kind of distortion we saw in the cube illustration.

In a large mural of a niche, for example, we would want to paint the vase more as it appears on the left, regardless of the stationpoint of the viewer in actual space. Why? Too much distortion in a mural is ugly (that's just my opinion).  I'm not talking about anamorphism here (where the stationpoint strictly determines the construction of the paintings perspective), I'm talking about wall sized paintings in the style of the French landscape panoramas of Zuber et Cie. I'd argue that large murals are meant to be viewed from a distance, so our linear perspective should reflect that. 

What's On Pierre Finkelstein's Shelves?

Pierre Finkelstein is the owner of Grand Illusion Decorative Painting, in New York City. His client list includes many of Forbe's wealthiest from around the world, the very best interior designers, celebrity clients from Bon Jovi to Bill Gates, and venerable institutions such as the Getty Museum in L.A. and the Frick Museum in New York.

Firstly, I'd like to thank Pierre for letting us into his private atelier to view what is clearly a lifetime's worth of incredible reference books, and that's not to mention the filing cabinets full of catalogued photographs from all over the World, and what must be a vast digital library too. This is a man who understands that no matter how good you are, you're never too good to learn from the past.

Author, painter, teacher, bookseller, even manufacturer of his own line of brushes and tools, Pierre's been at the top of his game professionally for years, so it's not surprising that his shelves are overstuffed with obscure reference manuals and folios of vintage prints. These are the shelves of someone who clearly uses books. 

Of his collecting and his "thirst for reference," Pierre admits that he is "a book and brush fiend:"

"What can I say?" he adds, "I especially cherish the folios i have acquired over the years, and my rare out of print editions of paint and decorative  manuals. I have paid as much as $600 for an out of print Italian  book on ceiling painting ( took me 10 years to find it) and $250 for a 10 page folio.. no matter the price, if one plate (page of a folio) or one page will give me the idea that I need to realize a several thousand dollar project, it is a well worth investment."

I won't list every title, because I couldn't possibly, but here are a few highlights. Starting from the top, a Strand bag gives a clue to the possible source of some of Pierre's purchases. Boasting "eight miles" of shelves, with most of them seemingly dedicated to art books, Strand is a must-see for any New York tourist. 

Next shelf down, we start with Gamle Trehus, literally "old wooden house;"  a book about architectural details in Norwegian folk buildings. Continuing with the North European theme, Brockdorf's Palace, otherwise known as Frederik VIII's Palace, in Copenahgen is the subject of this book dealing with the restoration in 2009. Neo-Classicism in the North is a book I highly recommend for those interested in Swedish interiors, and that particularly Scandinavian color sense and formality with regard to decorative painting.

Nicolas Petit and Jean-Francois Hache get the monograph treatment for their outstanding marquetry. Williamsburg: decorating with style is more a reference book on period details than it is about painted interiors per se, and is more general in theme than the highly recommended Paint in America volume by Roger Moss, which gets into fascinating detail about historic colors of america. It's a much dog-eared and underlined book on my own shelf. Architect Russell Versaci's popular book on how to convincingly create that New Old House look, from an American perspective yet using classical ideas of proportion. Paris Rome Athens is dedicated to the Grand Tours of some of France's best known architects of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, featuring many of their stunning ink-wash renderings of antiquities.

Moving to the right I can just about make out a few classic instruction books such as Spencer's The Art of Woodgraining, The Art of Marbling, and Parry's Graining and Marbling. All worthy tomes. Borghini's Marmi Antichi is a hefty reference manual identifying literally hundreds of marbles, as is Hoepli's Pietre Decorative. Faustino Corsi's original 1833 version of Delle Pietre Antichi is available for free PDF download, but of course the FMR version is much sexier.

I'm a sucker for books on French wallpaper, so I spotted Joanna Banham's Papiers Peints right away, along with Papiers Peints Francais (Rizzoli, French version), and Les Papiers Peints En Arabesques.  Textile designer Fortuny sits next to stencil books by Althea Wilson and A. Desaint . The justly ubiquitous Dover publications are next, along with a couple of Pepin press classic reference books. Pepin's print quality has always trumped Dover's, in my opinion, although Dover is just so damn cheap and they cover so much ground that they're unbeatable.

Large format Konemann volumes on Italian Palaces, and smaller books on Italian frescos are hidden behind a loose stack of books.

Thomas Jayne's The Finest Rooms in America
Masseuci's book on Antonio Bassoli
Antonio Bassoli; decori e Arredi
Les Boiseries du Musée Carnavalet
Now Playing: Hand-Painted Poster Art from 1910-1950
Identifying Marble, Jacques Dubarry Lassale, published by H. Vial
Venetian Palazzi, published by Evergreen
Felice Giani, two volume set by Anna Ottani Cavina

Barberot's rare Traité Pratique series is here represented by his book on cabinetmaking (or Menuiserie), published by C. Béranger in 1911. I couldn't find that one for sale, so nice score, Pierre!

Okay, well that should keep you all busy for a while. And I didn't even get to the bottom shelf (below), or any of the Henri Vial editions that Pierre offers on his website.

You'll just have to hit the reference library for copies of these superb vintage titles, I'm afraid

These last three images are of some of the many excellent titles that Pierre offers for sale at his site

A parting shot of another set of Pierre's personal collection.
You'll just have to do your own digging for these titles!

Christophe Huet, Singeries at the Hotel du Rohan

Famous for his magnificent monkey paintings - known as Singeries - Christophe Huet painted this extraordinary set of panels for the Hotel du Rohan, in Paris. Popular to this day, these cheeky and occasionally racy anthropomorphic painted scenes of monkeys cavorting in human garb were hugely fashionable in Eighteenth Century France.





Though Berain and Audran were justly as famous in their day, Huet has perhaps been better remembered because of the quality of his surviving examples at the Chateau de Chatilly. Bertrand du Vignaud, head of the World Monuments Fund in Europe, says, “I consider the Grand Singerie the most important décor in the chateau,” claiming that “It is Huet’s masterpiece."

I was thrilled to come across this practically unknown set of phototype plates of his Cabinet des Singes for Rohan from a volume called Les Vieux Hotels de Paris, printed in 1905. One of a series of large folios containing beautiful prints, these books were an attempt to archive surviving examples of interior and exterior decoration around Paris at the turn of the 20th century.




His work at the Hotel du Rohan is lesser known than Chantilly, but deserves recognition. Originally built in 1705, and home to successive cardinals and bishops, Huet's Rohan panels were eventually commissioned some time around 1750 by the Cardinal de Soubise, who gave the Hotel (by which term they mean mansion) a complete transformation. According to the book Debut de l'Imprimerie en France, Huet was assisted in painting the panels by Dutour, who painted the animals, and Crespin, who painted the landscapes. Huet is said to have painted the "flowers," by which I am assuming that means to include the ornamental borders and frames.




Those were heady times, to be sure. Marie Antoinette would regularly come poncing by for some cake with her entourage, before the whole party went tits up. Then, during the Revolution, it was placed into receivership and all its furniture and magnificent library were scattered to the winds. Later, after Napoleon had acquired it, the National Printing Press settled into it as their plush new 10,000 square meter HQ. It was eventually left to the National Archive in 1927, when Robert Danis was responsible for the gargantuan task of restoring the mansion to its former glory. Years of abuse, including the stripping out of the grand staircase to accommodate printing offices, left it a shell of its former self. Despite extensive efforts, much of the old decorations have not survived.



The panels have that unmistakable Huet look. His linework when seen up close and in black & white, has  the quality of an engraving that's received washes of color.

Thomas Jayne Wins Arthur Ross Award

I had the pleasure of restoring these antique Chinese panels for Thomas Jayne

Congratulations to Thomas Jayne for winning the Arthur Ross Excellence Award for Interior Design, announced by ICAA today. It's no surprise really, as Jayne and his team have been producing stunning interiors informed by history yet resolutely facing the future, for over two decades.

Beaux-Arts apartment in New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

Schooled with the likes of Parish-Hadley and Kevin McNamara (who once quipped that "rich people don't need towel bars because they never hang up their towels"), and having received a scholarly education at Winterthur, the Met and the Getty, Jayne was a shoo-in for the Architectural Digest Top 100 list of best decorators in America.

Philadelphia townhouse [photo Peter Estersohn]

Join us on February 28th as we attend Jayne's lecture in promotion of his new(ish) monograph, American Decoration: A Sense of Place, published by Monacelli in 2012.

Cabinet Room, downtown loft, New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

 His traditional schooling might otherwise imply the production of dry "period" rooms, but Jayne is always conscious of the current time and place. And that place, for him, is America.  In his most recent book he traces his lineage back 400 years in America, through each of his family's homes, citing the likes of America's very first interior designer, Elsie De Wolfe, as influences. He refers to her ability to reference and assimilate European taste and style into something quintessentially American, and while he allows that there is no such thing as an absolute definition of American decoration,  it is something he consciously strives to achieve in his own work.

[photo Peter Estersohn]

He also, somehow, finds time to write weekly for his blog, for a personal glimpse into the working mind of one of America's top designers.

Jayne also authored the renowned Finest Rooms in America, showcasing the very best in interior and architectural design, from classics like Frank Lloyd Wright and Frances Elkins, to contemporary designers such as Bunny Williams, John Saladino, and of course, Albert Hadley.

[photo Peter Estersohn]

[photo Peter Estersohn]

Guest bedroom, [photo Peter Estersohn]

West Side apartment, New York City [photo Peter Estersohn]

I'll Show You Mine, If You Show Me Yours [Part I]

Wiley Purkey

Well, there's been such a huge response that I'm going to be making this into a series of posts. I'm getting palpitations thinking about all the money I could blow on the books I don't have here. 

Artist Wiley Purkey submitted this great selection. The period in American Art around the 1920s is fascinating to me. Artists reacted in different ways to the mechanization of Industry. Disenchanted by the industrialization of America, the likes of Edward Hopper captured the sense of urban isolation felt by so many. An intensely private man, and a lifelong celibate, he painted this America from the inside. The Regionalists, on the other hand, represented an artistic belief that rural America and back-to-basics labor off the land could replace urbanization and the factory-line. Illustrators Howard Pyle, and his student N.C. Wyeth, espoused a similar (called Brandywine) Romanticism of New England. Burchfield portrayed similarly heightened visions of the American landscape, turning his back on the urban world of his old friend Hopper. Andrew Wyeth was called a 'Regionalist' by his detractors, but he painted a "Pennsylvania [that] seems to groom itself with a cold gray tongue" [source]. This was not quite the Romantic regionalism of his contemporaries. Wyeth's was darker, more private. A rural version of Hopper's urbanity. Impressionists in Winter is, in my opinion, the best of Impressionist art. When the artist's palette is reduced to almost nothing, there's a reliance on composition and value that is almost Japanese at times. Not surprising then to see a copy of Whistler's beautiful Etchings here too.

Book Links: 

The Regionalists, by Nancy Heller

Charles Burchfield

Impressionists in Winter

Andrew Wyeth

James Montgomery Flagg
Maxfield Parrish

Theresa Cheek, of Art's The Answer!

Art's The Answer! is the fantastic blog written by Theresa Cheek, who clearly has a passion for the decorative arts, and for sharing all she comes across. Konemann does a great job of bringing out large format, lavishly photographed, and reasonably priced books on architecture and ornamentation. This is just a tiny selection of Theresa's vast collection on a huge variety of subjects. Be sure to check out her blog. And just peeking in on the far right is a book that's very popular with my West Coast friends, called Ca'toga. It's about the Dali-meets-Baroque-meets-Antiquity estate of Venetian artist Carlo Machiori. I've yet to come across a book dedicated solely to the painted surfaces of Versailles, but I'm sure it's out there. Until then, I love to browse through books such as Splendors of Versailles, for snippets of Oudry's landscapes and Fontenay's flowers and vases. Incredible stuff.

The St. Laurent book is a rare glimpse into the decor stylings of one of the 20th Century's very best designers. Jacques Grange features heavily in the selections, and though the lavishness of the homes becomes makes me feel a bit claustrophobic after a while [I want to run off and live in Wyeth's cabin by the end of the book], it's well worth the investment.

Koneman titles

Ca'toga
The Private World of Yves St. Laurent & Pierre Bergé
Splendors of Versailles

Karen

The 1920s once again putting on a strong show, this time from a European design perspective. Karen of Chicago's Des Travaux sent us this great shot, showing some of the stalwart classics we all know and love, along with some real treasures. Jansen Furniture is a great book about the powerhouse Paris-based design company, who's ebony and ivory geometrical inlay doors are a real treat. I narrowly missed the opportunity to create replicas of those doors once. Jean Dunand is also a master interior designer, and perhaps the greatest lacquer artist of the Art Deco period. I've downloaded any image of his incredible standing screens that I can get my hands on. Paul Poiret is the creator of the most beautiful dresses ever made. Click the link and you'll see what I mean. It's tragic that he was ruined completely by WWI and made bankrupt. As someone who'd backed myself into a rarified corner of decorative painting, I'm all too aware that tough times reveal the precariousness of this business. Elkins, on the other hand, thrived, and by the end of her illustrious career had created a huge number of interiors for the West Coast glitterati. And what I wouldn't give for that copy of Antonio Basoli's stunning designs.

Jansen Furniture

Jean Dunand

Poiret (Rizzoli)

Frances Elkins

Antonio Basoli

Early American Decoration

Chinoiserie (Phaidon)

Art Instruction books that I see on a lot of shelves (including my own):

The Art of Faux (P. Finkelstein)

Handbook of Painted Decoration (Y. Guegan)

Okay, gotta go. Keep sending them in! I'll upload more shots when I have a chance.

Engravings of Raphael's Designs for the Vatican Loggia

This should quicken the pulse of at least a few ornament nerds out there. I know I'm not completely alone. Yeah, you know who you are. This is my second post on the subject of the extremely rare full color set of engravings, hand-painted in gouache, of Raphael's incredible designs for the Vatican Loggia.

I posted an enormous set with 277 large format details, taken directly from the original engravings, on my Flickr page. You won't find these anywhere else, you lucky lucky bastards. Except if you happen to own one of the only three full surviving color sets, of course. In which case I hate you.

For information on the engravings themselves, and background to the Vatican loggia, see this earlier post on my blog.

Enjoy!

Wearing black ski masks, and suspended from the ceiling so as not to trip the alarms

Here's an oblique detail showing the beautiful gilding on the Noah's Ark panel

Irish Folk Furniture

I could have just posted the link on Facebook, but I'm dedicating a blogpost to it instead. You won't regret it. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that there is an inherent human desire to build and decorate, simply.

This Irish short film by Tony O Donoghue (which just won the prize for Best Animated Short at Sundance 2013) is totally charming, and though as an Irishman I find subtitles of the brogue a little distracting, it's a lovely reminder that since we crawled out from the muck humans have made aesthetic choices about everyday objects, and that the roots of art are in gnarled knuckles and mindful living,