Sheffield School of Interior Design Distance Education

Welcome to the series that we\'ve created especially for Sheffield\'s Designer Monthly. Because Sheffield\'s Complete Course in Interior Design is a concentrated vocational training program, it does not delve into the history of art and design to the extent that a four-year college program might.

However, as Sheffield students know, we firmly believe that students of Interior design must reward themselves at every opportunity by viewing and enjoying all forms of art. Whether it\'s design, painting, architecture or music, your clients are paying you for your sense of taste. That means that the more areas of human creativity you sample, the richer your own sense of the world and the history of art and architecture will become.

We also know that not everyone lives near the wonderful collections of art and design that we enjoy here in New York City. That\'s why we\'ve created this series. By reading the articles in this series and using the Internet to view the illustrations we cite, you\'ll be able to learn a lot about each of the topics we cover.

Why don\'t we illustrate the article with images and photographs? The answer has to do with the ever-changing question of intellectual property on the Internet. Because of copyright restrictions on images, we have chosen not to scan or take them from the Internet. The best way to utilize this article is to print it out and go to the sites suggested in parentheses as you read.

[Please note: When we went to press these links were all working. Over time some may not function. You can always search for relevant individuals or subjects using your favorite search engine. Please also note that our policy of including hot links in certain articles does not constitute our company\'s endorsement of the content of other Web sites or of their policies or products.]

This series is being written by a New York writer named Susanne Reece, who helped us develop this concept. Susanne is an ideal candidate for the job because she was a graduate student in art history before becoming a professional writer. If you have comments, suggestions or topics you would like to see us cover, feel free to contact us at art@sheffield.edu.

American Painting: Grand Illusions – 19th Century American Trompe l'oeil and Still life Painting

We're pleased to present the second part of a series on American Painting from Colonial times through the 19th Century. In Part One we discussed the Limner tradition – traveling artists in early America who painted everything from signs to portraits. In subsequent articles we'll feature Portraiture both before and after the advent of photography, and 19th century American landscapes.

Trompe l'oeil is French for "fool the eye." It is a type of painting in which the artist paints in a meticulous, exacting manner and employs visual tricks in order to manipulate the viewer into thinking that the illusion before the eyes is actually real. William Michael Harnett's The Old Violin (oil on canvas, 1886; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) is a superb example of American trompe l'oeil painting. A well-used violin hangs on wooden door with its bow and and piece of sheet music. When the painting was exhibited at an exposition in Cincinnati, Ohio, guards actually had to be stationed around it to keep visitors from touching it.

Trompe l'oeil painting has a long history that stretches all the way back to Greek and Roman antiquity. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder, an ancient historian, records the story of Zeuxis and Parrahasius, two still life painters. The two ancient Greek masters challenged each other to an artistic duel to determine once and for all who was the better painter. Zeuxis painted such a realistic painting of grapes that real birds tried to eat them. When Zeuxis went to his challenger's studio to boast of this feat, he tried to pull aside a curtain covering one of Parrahasius's paintings. The curtain was painted, and Zeuxis had been fooled into thinking it was real. He humbly admitted defeat. Trompe l'oeil images can be found everywhere from mosaic floors of ancient Roman villas designed to look like they are strewn with the leftovers from a wild party, to the Baroque frescoed ceiling of the Church of St. Ignazio in Rome by Fra Andrea Pozzo , 1691-94, , to the walls of 19th century American saloons, where many of William Michael Harnett's paintings like The Old Violin were hung.

The ability to recreate something from real life on the canvas was used by American artists in the 17th and 18th centuries, who often made their livings as portraitists. Colonists and then the citizens of the new republic wished to continue the European tradition of preserving their and their families' likenesses for posterity. By the 19th century, particularly in the growing urban centers of Boston, Philadelphia and New York, prosperous merchants and members of the upper middle class began supporting a more diverse art market. These art patrons were largely born, raised and educated in America and so their tastes were not as tied to the artistic traditions of Europe.

In Europe, well into the 19th century, a strong hierarchy of painting dominated in which the highest form of painting was considered history painting – usually big, overblown scenes depicting stories from ancient Greek or Roman mythology or history – and the lowest, still-life painting. Amazing as it may seem, the 17th century Dutch painter Willem de Kalf, whose works like Still Life with Drinking Horn (1653, oil on canvas; National Gallery of Art, London) now grace the walls of the world's most prestigious museums, would have been considered the low man in the artistic pecking order. American painting may well have continued the hierarchies of European painting if not for the strong tradition in still-life and trompe l'oeil painting established by Charles Willson Peale(1741-1827) and his son, Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825). Charles Willson Peale was the epitome of a renaissance man – inventor, amateur scientist, archaeologist, taxonomist and collector of curiosities. He founded a museum in his native Philadelphia. When he wasn't busy doing all of these, he made his living as a portrait painter. He also fathered ten children, eight of whom would become painters. Consciously setting out to found a painting dynasty, Peale named all of his children after famous artists from the past.

Charles Willson Peale's The Staircase Group (1795, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art) stands as a kind of manifesto for American illusionistic painting. Life-size, the painting shows the artist's two sons Raphaelle, holding a palette and malstick, and Titian ascending a staircase. They have paused to look out at the viewer and so bridge the gap between imagined and real space. Further heightening his effect was an actual wooden doorframe used to hold the canvas, and a real wooden step that was placed at the bottom edge. An American version of the Zeuxis legend tells that George Washington, a friend of the Peale family, walked by, and fooled by the painting, greeted the boys.

Raphaelle Peale made his living, like his father, as a portrait painter. However, when he painted for himself, and when he showed paintings in exhibitions, they were still lifes and trompe l'oeils. The art historian Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. has argued that Raphaelle Peale consciously set out to democratize American painting with the traditionally humble form of still life painting. While European painting placed value on an idealized realism and high-minded subject matter, Peale championed the virtues of craftsmanship and technical facility.

Raphaelle Peale's still life paintings typically contain ordinary, everyday items. In Still life with Peach (c.1816, oil on canvas; San Diego Museum of Art), he places a single peach in the center of the canvas. Bathed in light, the peach takes on a monumental, sculptural quality. Peale renders every detail with astonishing precision, in beautiful, glowing color.

In addition to the simple beauty of works like Still life with Peach, he also painted equally virtuoso, and cleverly ironic works. One of the most famous is Venus Rising from the Sea–A Deception (After the Bath)(1823;oil on canvas). The title of this painting gives away the joke. There is a painting of a presumably nude Venus, but all we see of her are her hands pulling up her long, flowing locks and her delicate feet, because Peale has chastely covered her with a starched white hanky. The detail in the hanky is amazing, and it seems that we could reach out and move it aside to see the painting hid beneath it. The reality of the hanky seems all the more real because what it is covering up is understood to be a painting, not a real nude woman. With this work, Peale plays on the old Zeuxis myth, but also seems to take a stab at the often prudish culture in which he lived.

By the mid to late 19th century, Raphaelle Peale, his still lifes and trompe l'oeils, had been largely forgotten. Illusionism, however, continued to thrive, particularly at the same time photography was evolving and on its way to usurping the painter in many ways. A photographer could record a person's likeness as well, if not better, than a painter could, and at much less expense. They could capture landscapes and preserve memories of travels. And photographers could also record historical events, as they did during the Civil War. What photographers could not do, however, was capture the imagination of the public in the same way that a trompe l'oeil painting could.

For example, a photograph of a banknote would have been unlikely to have been as interesting as an illusionistic painting of one, like William Michael Harnett's Still life Five-Dollar Bill (1877, oil on canvas; Philadelphia Museum of Art). The fact that a human hand and eye were able to copy so exactingly an object is where the fascination lies. Harnett and his colleagues John Haberle and John Frederick Peto all painted "counterfeit" notes, and all eventually ran into trouble with the government because of this. John Haberle's Imitation (1887, oil on canvas; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) sees Harnett's five-spot and raises him. He includes banknotes, coins, a photograph and stamps, all seemingly glued down at random. The photo seems to be tucked into the corner of the illusionistic wood frame, and the stamps look like they are stuck to the frame.

In Harnett's, Haberle's and John Frederick Peto's other still lifes, they create groupings of old, worn objects like leather-bound books, pipes and stoneware. Peto's Still life with Lard Oil Lamp (c.1900, oil on canvas; Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ) is filled with old, dusty objects that seem to have been placed on a shelf and forgotten. Dutch 17th century still-life painting, the tradition on which American still life painting ultimately rests, favored luxurious porcelain, glass and metalwork, and sumptuous food, as in Willem de Kalf's Still life with Drinking Horn discussed above. The historian Simon Schama has argued that the Dutch reveled in such luxuries but also struggled with their consciences about doing so – it was an incredibly wealthy society, yet also an incredibly pious one. The Dutch still lifes celebrate the bounty of Dutch society while at the same time delivering a moralizing message about the vanity of earthly goods. During America's Gilded Age, when all shimmered and glittered, nostalgia for simpler times grew, as did the popularity of still lifes such as Peto's.

While illusionistic painting has not generally been regarded highly by art critics in our age of multi-media and conceptual art, it nonetheless remains popular with the public. Photography has not satisfied the desire to see virtuoso performances of the artist's hand, brush and eye on canvas. And even museums are beginning to recognize this, as the recent retrospective of Norman Rockwell's work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim proves. Illusionistic realism, critically esteemed or not, in or out of fashion, remains an essential part of our American artistic heritage.

Sources for Further Reading:

Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes. National Gallery of Art, 1989.

Robert Hughes, American Visions The Epic History of Art in America, New York Knopf, 1997.

Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. Paperback edition. Vintage Books, 1997.

www.artcyclopedia.com
www.artchive.com
www.nga.gov

–Susanne Reece

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