analysis

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NIKA ELDER

William Harnett Shows

His Hand

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In 1890, The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace went on display in the windows of Black, Starr & Frost, the oldest and one of the most elite jewelry firms in New York City (figs. 1, 2). Both paintings—still lifes by American artist William Harnett—portray objects that have been handled, used, and bear the marks of age. The Faithful Colt depicts a rusted .44-caliber Model 1860 Colt Army Revolver hanging against weathered wooden planks coeval with the surface of the picture plane. Its companion, Emblems of Peace, pictures an eclectic collection of objects haphazardly stacked upon a carved wooden table; the collection includes six leather-bound books, a musical score and newspaper, a ceramic jug and flute, a candlestick and scissors, an overturned meerschaum pipe, a box of tobacco, and matches. These things—not to mention the rustic and antiquated settings in which they were depicted—would have differed markedly from the opulent surroundings in which the paintings were origi- nally displayed. In the late nineteenth century, Black, Starr & Frost sold everything from fine clocks, watches, and leather goods to silver and gold tea services, trophies, and flatware. These elegant items were displayed in the firm’s luxurious showrooms, which moved up Broadway and, later, Fifth Avenue no fewer than six times, following the flow of consumer traffic.1

Despite the obvious differences between the objects displayed in The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace and the goods for sale at Black, Starr & Frost, scholars have characterized the artworks as trompe l’oeil deceptions that sought to trick the viewer, if only momentarily, into thinking their tableaux were extensions of the settings in which they were seen.2 Rendered with imperceptible brushwork, the paintings have been understood as an attempt to acclimate their original viewers, who were also consumers, to the deceptions of modern capitalism; they were teaching these view- ers to be more attentive to the illusionism of commodities, which promise more than they could ever deliver.

Harnett, however, would have seen the products for sale at Black, Starr & Frost as much more than commodities. From 1869 to 1875, the artist worked as a silver engraver at Wood & Hughes and, it is thought, Tiffany & Company. These firms, along with Black, Starr & Frost (which acquired Wood & Hughes in 1900) and Gorham Manufacturing Company, constituted the most reputable silver manufacturers in the country.3 That Harnett worked in the silver industry is one of the few facts we have about his life. He left no letters, no journals, no personal or professional correspon- dence of any kind. In the absence of such documents, Harnett’s work is well suited to poststructuralist readings that consider his paintings in terms of their reception.4 Although there are no written insights into the artist’s motivations and interests, the Archives of American Art holds a sketchbook of ornamental designs Harnett made in the early 1870s during his time as a silver engraver.

The drawings in the sketchbook look unlike anything scholars have come to expect from Harnett. There are neither tattered books, elegant instruments, nor any three-dimensional objects represented; there are only fifteen pages of ornamental designs likely destined for silver flatware. Though Harnett’s drawings and paintings differ dramatically in subject matter, the sketchbook offers unexpected insights into the technique he used to create his paintings and, by extension, the cultural as well as professional concerns that motivated his fine art. Using the sketchbook as a key primary source, this essay brings Harnett’s paintings into conversation with his work

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Fig. 1

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Fig. 2

Fig. 1 William Michael Harnett, The Faithful Colt, 1890. Oil on canvas, 22 ½ x 18 ½ in. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1935.236. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Photograph by Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.

Fig. 2 William Michael Harnett, Emblems of Peace, 1890. Oil on canvas, 27 ½ x 33 ¾ in. Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA. Gift of Charles T. and Emilie Shean. Photograph by David Stansbury.

as a silver engraver to offer a new perspective on the impeccable brushwork that has come to characterize his art.

The years in which Harnett worked in the silver industry are normally associated with rapid industrialization.5 Bolstered by the discovery of new silver reserves, silver manufacturing increased exponentially, and ever more machinery was introduced to make the most of this supply. Ironically, however, the ability to mass-produce silver goods coincided with renewed emphasis on skill at every step in the production pro- cess—from designing to engraving, and from the training of employees to the mar- keting of finished products. Having worked in the industry, then, Harnett would not have seen the goods for sale at Black, Starr & Frost as illusionistic commodities, but rather as works of impeccable craftsmanship. The polished tea sets and flatware were the end result of a series of creative decisions and technical maneuvers executed by men of skill and training.

Harnett’s sketches offer insight into his seemingly routine, yet decidedly imagina- tive, role in this process. Further, they suggest that, like the ornaments he inscribed on silverware, trompe l’oeil was also a matter of technique. Rather than a pictorial style and a mode of deception, it was a mode of production that asserted Harnett’s manual skill and, by extension, defined his paintings over and against the scourge of mechanically reproduced images in late nineteenth-century America. Trained in the silver industry and the nation’s premier art academies, Harnett did not approach painting as a tool to adapt the public to a rapidly industrializing consumer culture so much as a craft that needed to be upheld and preserved in the face of it.

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Harnett began his career as an engraver in 1865. First he worked on steel, copper, and wood, and eventually graduated to silver.6 As an engraver in the jewelry business, Harnett would have inscribed monograms and other designs onto silver flatware and other custom objects—work that fine art- ists of the period, such as Asher B. Durand, considered rather tedious and monoto- nous.7 These basic facts about Harnett’s career make the sketchbook in the Archives all the more surprising. In the eighteenth century, a craftsman like Paul Revere would have executed or overseen everything from the design to the inscription of the objects he was commissioned to make, so we might expect him to have sketched out all of these details.8 But by the 1870s, when companies like Gorham divided this labor into no fewer than twelve trades, it seems remarkable that a silver engraver, in what appears to have been a rather low-level position, would have kept a sketchbook, let alone one so whimsical and experimental as Harnett’s.9 Perhaps further scholarship on the silver industry and the early professional lives of artists will prove that it was common for engravers of flatware and other decorative objects to make such studies. Whether or not it is an anomaly in the industry, Harnett’s sketchbook offers welcome insight into his training, manual skill, and the cultural imperatives behind them.

In the sketchbook’s fifteen pages, Harnett is given to incredible flights of fancy.10 Only in rare instances, such as pages 4, 7, and 12, does he adopt a methodical and relatively systematic approach, dividing the sheets into sections, each contain- ing its own discrete motif or set of designs. Otherwise and elsewhere, his approach is more haphazard. Pages 1, 9, 19, and 28, for example, are covered with a flurry of designs, whereas the frontispiece (cover verso) and pages 5, 13–18, 21, and 25 bear only a few unrelated motifs. Two large designs anchor page 3, but the rest of the sheet is filled with all manner of motifs, many of which bear no obvious formal relationship to one another (fig. 3). Although the designs that extend across the top of the page are clearly variations on a theme, below them lighter, more whimsical motifs introduce wispy lines and decorative dots unrelated to the row of designs above. Only the semicircle at the bottom of the page, with its crisp and even line, appears to have been executed with the aid of a compass or a similar tool for ensuring precision. Otherwise, the lines are sketchy and imprecise; they double back on themselves and are asymmetrical, loose doodles rather than firm plans. While free line work and eclectic imagery are typical of artists’ sketchbooks and journals, these features would have been highly unusual for an engraver, who was expected to do little more than inscribe initials and standard designs on the ends of flatware. Harnett’s sketchbook, however, reveals the imagination intrinsic to the trade as it was practiced among the most elite firms in the late nineteenth century. As a result, it revises modern perceptions of engraving as a professional practice, our understanding of drawing as an artistic medium, and, ultimately, Harnett’s interest in trompe l’oeil.

The sketchbook represents one of two approaches to drawing that Harnett prac- ticed in his early adult years. While he worked as a silver engraver, Harnett also took classes at three prestigious art academies: the National Academy of Design (NAD), the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).11 Institutions like Wood & Hughes and PAFA employed drawing in radically different ways, and these differences reveal the impor-

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tance Harnett would have ascribed to sketching and to the principles and values he picked up through his relation to the silver industry.

Two of Harnett’s figurative academic studies survive: a drawing of the Venus de Milo and another of the Borghese Warrior (fig. 4). In both works, the eponymous sculptures are rendered in charcoal on oversized paper as Harnett seeks to work out, with mixed success, human anatomy, foreshortening, and translating the body from three dimensions to two. The drawings’ fidelity (desired or actual) to their models enables us to understand the freedom and creativity that Harnett found and embraced in designing and engraving ornaments. Harnett is known to have taken antique classes at PAFA and life classes at NAD.12 In both schools, he became acquainted with the cornerstone of academic painting at the time, the human fig- ure—first, in the form of casts of classical statuary and, later, at a more advanced level, through work with live models. But rather than learn to paint this subject, he and his classmates were taught to draw it.13 Through careful observation and meticu- lous draftsmanship, they learned to copy. Drawing was not the time to invent, inno- vate, and imagine, but to imitate, replicate, and reproduce. It was the first step in the production of a significant work of fine art, but it was also the most routine and mechanical part of the process. Like the casts on which they were based, academic drawings of the Borghese Warrior and Venus de Milo were reproductions, simply in two dimensions instead of three.

Rather than copying and transcribing, designers and engravers in the silver industry used drawing to devise new and original motifs and silhouettes. This is not to say they came up with them out of thin air. Their work was based on models, but the goal was not to copy these models so much as to reimagine and reinvent them.

Fig. 3

Fig. 3 William Michael Harnett sketchbook, 1870, 3. Graphite on paper, 5 ½ x 7 ¼ in. William Harnett Sketches, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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Fig. 4

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Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 4 William Michael Harnett, Borghese Warrior, 1873. Charcoal and white chalk on pink (toned) laid paper, 39 ½ x 34 in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David J. Grossman, acc. no. 1960.16.

Fig. 5 William Michael Harnett sketchbook, 1870, 20. Graphite on paper, 5 ½ x 7 ¼ in. William Harnett Sketches, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Fig. 6 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, plate XIX, Greek No. 5 (detail). (London: Day and Son, 1856).

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Fig. 7

The ornaments in Harnett’s sketchbook engage such an inherited vocabulary of motifs. On pages 2, 4, 20, 27, and 28, for example, there are lotus blossoms and pal- mettes that one might find on ancient Greek and Etruscan vases (figs. 5, 6). The design on the frontispiece is comprised of the kinds of interwoven lines that characterize Celtic carvings. The chandelier-like designs on pages 6, 7, 11, 19, and elsewhere in the sketchbook are, next to the lotus blossoms and palmettes, its most common forms, and resonate with the cascading vines in Italian Renaissance decoration (fig. 7).

These historical motifs and others filled books like The Grammar of Ornament (fig. 8), a compendium of designs spanning the entire globe and human history, which the British architect and designer Owen Jones published in 1856. Jones wanted to encourage designers to return to nature and reinterpret it for the modern age. Indeed, his goal was to

aid in arresting that unfortunate tendency of our time to be content with copying, whilst the fashion lasts, the forms peculiar to any bygone age, without attempting to ascertain, generally completely ignoring, the pecu- liar circumstances which rendered an ornament beautiful, because it was appropriate, and which as expressive of other wants, when thus trans- planted, as entirely fails.14

Jones, however, was unsuccessful in this endeavor, as The Grammar of Ornament became one of the definitive sourcebooks for designers in the United States.15 In fact, Tiffany & Company and Gorham built libraries and collections on site precisely to

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Fig. 8

provide their employees with reference materials such as Jones’s book. As curator Charles Venable notes, “The collections of natural specimens, art reproductions, and books noted in these passages [of articles on the design firms] were, along with the talent of the designers, the life blood of each firm’s design room. Consequently, these collections were often extensive.”16 Describing his visit to the Tiffany studio on Prince Street in New York in 1887, one visitor went as far as to compare it to the American Museum of Natural History, since it was full of “well-preserved counterfeits of birds and smaller animals, as also gourds, ears of corn, grasses &c., all of which have

Fig. 7 William Michael Harnett sketchbook, 1870, 19. Graphite on paper, 5 ½ x 7 ¼ in. William Harnett Sketches, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Fig. 8 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, plate LXXVI, Renaissance No. 3 (London: Day and Son, 1856).

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already served or still serve, as studies.” “Running back the entire length of the long, light room are drawing-boards, at which sit busy designers,” he went on to observe,

“while about them hang plaster casts, models and electrotypes of designs which have graced work previously done.”17 These resources were a designer’s and, it appears, engraver’s first recourse in developing new work: these individuals researched extant objects, models, and motifs, revising them into novel configurations.

The designs in Harnett’s sketchbook make visible this process of interpreta- tion, translation, and transformation. Take, for example, the row of seven motifs that extend across the top of page 3 (see fig. 3). The first iteration looks like a stylized Venetian mask. One unbroken line creates a pointy “nose” and bends back upon itself to create two square “eyes,” each of which graces a “flap” on either side of the “nose.” In the next iteration, the line is broken, and the “eyes” are removed. The third version is almost the inverse of the other two; the negative spaces have been shaded with thin horizontal lines. The fourth marks a radical departure that combines elements of all the previous versions, such as the shading from iteration three and the broken line from version two. In the fifth version, Harnett retains the three closed shapes that emerged in the fourth and underscores two of them with doubled lines. The sixth and seventh iterations take another drastic turn, as the doubled line introduced in version five becomes the governing element and shape, and results in a semicircular form punctuated by a central column containing a stylized floral design. The fact that the first motif in the series appears fully formed and resolved suggests that Harnett likely imported it from somewhere else, but the source is unknown.

The important thing to note is not the reference point for this motif, which we may yet discover in a late nineteenth-century design catalogue, but what Harnett does with it. Each successive motif responds to and expands upon elements developed within previous iterations. Although the process, as described here, sounds relatively methodical and systematic, the varied size, spacing, and hand of the sketches suggest it was incredibly intuitive and creative. Harnett appears to embark on these formal experiments without any recognizable goal other than dismantling and reconstruct- ing the visual vocabulary he would have inherited from the eclectic collections and vast libraries maintained by the firms where he worked.

The sketchbook does not contain any records of the objects on which Harnett worked, any written testimonials to his area of specialization, or any insights into his entrée into the silver industry. While we cannot say for sure where Harnett’s designs ended up, they were likely destined for custom-made flatware and other silver goods. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the manufacture of silver goods was, in large part, mechanized, but specialty items—from utensils to trophies to tea sets— continued to be made by hand.18 Unlike mass-produced objects, such items provided ample opportunities and demand for formal as well as technical experimentation. Engravers could (and, in fact, had to) take liberties with their sketches in order to adapt them to a range of items, while designers had to draw fully integrated objects that machines would be able to (re)produce.

The sketchbooks kept by Edward C. Moore, a designer, manager, and ultimately artistic director of Tiffany & Company during this time, exemplify the possibilities for and restrictions on such work.19 A prototypical page bears designs for three spoons, each with a different silhouette that dictates the parameters and the geometry of the

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Fig. 11

Fig. 10

Fig. 9

ornamentation upon it (fig. 9). The motifs reinforce and underscore elegant aspects of the silhouettes, but they are also fully embedded within them. By contrast, Harnett’s motifs float freely on the page, divorced from particular objects. They would have to be adapted, and adaptable, to different types of utensils and perhaps other kinds of things altogether.

Although none of the silverware that Wood & Hughes or Tiffany & Company produced in the early 1870s has been specifically linked to Harnett, a napkin ring that the artist made for the family of his friend William Ignatius Blemly, a colleague from Wood & Hughes, survives in the Blemly family collection and offers a sense of what Harnett’s finished work might have looked like (fig. 10). The initials “MJB” are inscribed in cursive script in the center of the ring and surrounded by an ornate geometric pattern similar to one on page 3 of Harnett’s sketchbook (fig. 11). Although we cannot definitively link the sketch to the napkin ring, they are both comprised of two interlocking open bands that conclude in swirls—yet with some important differences between them. The sketch is much simpler and comprised strictly of full, straight lines, whereas the engraving is far more florid: one of the two lines in each band is serrated rather than straight; additional curlicues spin out of the concluding spirals; there is shading within the large spirals as well as the triangles at the top and bottom of the motif; and, of course, there is the monogram itself, at the center of it all. These differences, however, seem related to and indicative of the process of translat-

Fig. 9 E. C. Moore, Sketchbook—Flatware Designs. MS. Catalogue #311. © Tiffany & Co. Archives 2016.

Fig. 10 William Michael Harnett, napkin ring, ca. 1869–1875. Silver, approx. 1 ½ x 2 in. Inscribed: MJB. Blemly Family Collection. Image courtesy of Loranne Carey Block.

Fig. 11 William Michael Harnett sketchbook, 1870, 3 (detail). Graphite on paper, 5 ½ x 7 ¼ in. William Harnett Sketches, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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ing a sketch on paper to an ornament in silver. Harnett takes the opportunity to vary the lines, forms, and shapes overall from sketch to finished product.

But the final product—the engraving on the napkin ring—does not betray any of this work. It reads as a relatively generic design, easily and perhaps mechanically reproduced. The lines are firm, deliberate, and precise—if not altogether even and perfectly symmetrical. Harnett’s sketchbook, however, reveals the story behind such relatively pristine images. It allows us see the creative work that went into them and thus understand what engraving meant to Harnett and to those who produced and consumed silver goods at the end of the nineteenth century. It was not a mechani- cal and routine endeavor, solely dependent upon technical skill, but an imaginative process that invested commercial objects with personal value. This value certainly inhered in any initials that might be inscribed upon the objects, but it also emerged from the extended process of devising engravings of all kinds. Harnett appropriated a vocabulary of letters and images from extant sources, sketched and transformed them into new configurations or original combinations, and then adapted and trans- posed these designs into lines on silver. It was a creative process that would have differed dramatically from the kind of work he was doing at NAD and PAFA. Rather than reproducing extant models, he reimagined them in ways that lent commercial objects a personal touch, literally and figuratively.

The silverware on which Harnett worked was largely made by hand and benefited from the concerted attention of a number of trained craftsmen and technicians. As Harnett embarked on his career as a professional painter, he would abandon the flo- ral and geometric imagery that characterizes his sketches, but retain the silver indus- try’s investment in manual technique and technical skill. These concerns would become the substance of his work, manifest in the imperceptible handiwork that his paintings shared with his earlier engravings.

In his obituary for Harnett, the artist’s friend E. Taylor Snow suggests that mecha-nization forced Harnett out of the silver industry and into painting full time. Electroplating, a cheaper alternative to objects made entirely out of silver, obvi-ated the need for skilled engravers and, Snow claims, cost Harnett his job.20 Given that specialty objects continued to be made even as technologies of mass produc- tion were introduced into the trade, Snow’s claims are dubious; nonetheless, they do point to the explicit contest between mechanical production and manual skill that compelled the work that the silver industry required of Harnett and, as I will claim, motivated his approach to painting.

Through extensive training in both engraving and drawing, Harnett spent his early adult years cultivating his manual and technical skills to create unique, hand- made objects, be they paintings or flatware. Ironically, however, art historians have frequently compared his paintings to photographs because of their seemingly mechanical style. Douglas Nickel, for instance, has claimed that Harnett’s “imper- ceptible brushwork and seemingly equal regard for every detail and surface made his works appear more the creation of a machine than the human hand.”21 David Lubin has further noted that the paintings “look as though they have never been touched by painter or owner. They look instead as though they were made by an intricate, inordinately sophisticated, superphotographic machine.”22 While, for the most part,

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Harnett’s brushwork is imperceptible, his work and training in the silver industry should encourage us to think about the physical and intellectual work required to achieve this ostensibly effortless effect.

Recently scholars have explored how Harnett’s paintings and, more specifically, their “machine aesthetic” may have met the sociological needs of a rapidly expand- ing consumer economy.23 In his discussion of the discourse of deception around Harnett’s work, for example, Michael Leja asserts that nineteenth-century accounts of the paintings fooling Americans were exaggerations that testify to the haptic and psychological desires the works stirred and, therefore, to the participation of Harnett’s paintings in cultural anxieties around commodity desire.24 But my analysis of Harnett’s sketchbook suggests that, as an engraver and academically trained art- ist, Harnett would have been less concerned with the fetishism of commodities than with mechanical reproduction’s impact on manual labor, technical skill, and thus the cultural value of the kinds of art and craft in which he had spent more than a decade (1865–1877) becoming well versed. In a rapidly changing commercial as well as visual and material landscape, his imperceptible brushwork should not be understood exclusively as a means to deceive the viewer, but also as a way to invest his paintings with the technical skill and personal touch attributed to hand engraving. Harnett envisioned his paintings as handcrafted objects whose emphatically material quality was meant to distinguish them from, rather than imitate, the mechanical character of photography. The paintings, of course, might take on other lives and meanings once they entered the commercial marketplace, but to recognize Harnett’s motivations is to consider the paintings on their own terms and thereby to understand the picto- rial and cultural imperatives behind them, in addition to the social functions they may have served.

Conservation reports on Harnett’s paintings reveal how he achieved the immacu- late surfaces that characterize his work and provide insight into his technique. First, he applied a thick ground in vertical strokes, which would obscure the natural weave of the canvas and evoke the grain of the wooden paneling that would be painted on top of it. Next, he would score the ground, likely with the back of a paintbrush, to create the cracks and splits that appeared to mar the wood. He then painted each object individually into the composition; if there was any overlap among the objects (such as the gun and newspaper clipping displayed against the wooden planks in The Faithful Colt), they were depicted in successive layers.25 It was an incredibly labo- rious and, one imagines, tedious process that was the source of much speculation among critics.

Although scholarship has focused on the admittedly apocryphal anecdotes about people trying to touch, pick, scratch, or otherwise test the veracity of the artist’s hyper-realistic paintings, much of the period criticism on Harnett’s work marvels at the time and effort he must have taken to produce it. For example, an unnamed critic for the Springfield Daily Republican claimed that Harnett spent seven months on Ease and asserted that “in every detail of the great variety of textures thus presented to the artist for his skill to reproduce, he has been sufficient to the task.”26 Likewise, upon seeing The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace on view at Black, Starr & Frost, critic Frank Linstow White wrote that “both paintings are executed with the pains- taking care so characteristic of Harnett. The ivory pistol and flute, discolored and

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cracked with age, the well-browned meerschaum, the gray stone-ware of the jug, the tobacco curling out over the edge of the paper-box—everything is delineated with truth in the minutest detail.”27 Whether, like White and the Springfield reviewer, crit- ics commended Harnett’s attention to detail or they belittled him for it, professional reviewers were significantly less interested in the potentially deceptive aspects of Harnett’s work than in the labor that went into it. Today, we think of visible brush- work as the mark of an artist’s hand, but in late nineteenth-century America, the opposite was true, too. It was the decided lack of visible brushwork in his paintings that revealed Harnett’s skill to both art insider and bourgeois consumer.

Indeed, silver manufacturers expended much time, money, and effort on both cultivating and advertising the skill of the craftsmen who produced their wares. In addition to housing reference libraries and study collections, firms like Tiffany & Company hosted classes and courses that Charles Venable suggests “went beyond the standard apprenticeship system.”28 For example, he notes that “to hone its trainees’ skills, Tiffany’s held competitions and offered cash awards to those producing the finest designs and examples of chasing, repoussé, raising, and other technical skills.”29 This training was announced in the finish and polish of the objects them- selves, but also in the marketing materials and display strategies used to sell them. The illustrations in a self-published history of Black, Starr & Frost, where Harnett showed The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace in 1890, demonstrate how the company advertised its employees’ experience and training; these images can help explain how and why Harnett was interested in announcing his skill, too. One illustration in the brochure depicts an early showroom at the firm’s sixth location (fig. 12). Framed paintings hang above the glass vitrines, which are filled with all sorts of silver wares. The manufactured products were thus aligned with works of fine art, as objects of comparable value as well as skill. Significantly, it was in this era (the 1860s through the turn of the century) that silver manufacturers started naming flat- ware after key cities, artists, and styles in the history of art, and displaying paintings in their showrooms or in separate “art rooms” designed for this purpose.30

Should such displays and illustrations prove too subtle, Black, Starr & Frost made the labor that went into its items explicit in other areas of the brochure. Its anony- mous author assures potential customers, for instance, that

it must be borne in mind that all work is done right in the building, in the manufacturing shops on the upper floors, under the constant supervi- sion of the department heads and of the members of the firm. It means a good deal to realize that even the most precious gems may be entrusted to the firm, with the absolute assurance that they will not go out of the building, and that whatever work is to be done will be executed by men of skill and training.31

For the author and his customers, the fact that all work was done on site was a mat- ter of efficiency and ability as much as safety and security: while the final two pages of the brochure contain illustrations of two show pieces, the previous four reproduce photographs of men diligently at work in the silver engraving shop (fig. 13), the watch and clock shop, the jewelry shop, and the fine jewelry and diamond setting depart-

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ment, respectively. Rather than describe or even picture the goods for sale, the brochure pictured and touted the work, labor, and time that created them. In the midst of sweeping mechanization, advertising the manual labor that the design and manufacture of silver wares required helped validate their status as luxury goods.

For Tiffany, Gorham, and Black, Starr & Frost, encouraging and advertising the training, care, and talent of their workers assured customers that the goods they bought were original, valuable, and unique. These concerns might seem far removed from Harnett’s still lifes, which, in recent decades, have been described as repetitive, imitative, and even figuratively mass-produced.32 But the technique he used to pro- duce them and his investment in the materiality of paint suggest that a comparable interest in originality, or at least the handmade, compelled Harnett’s paintings.

Recall that in the mid-nineteenth century, electroplating and other technologies were being introduced into the silver industry at the same time that photography was becoming instrumental to both the fine and decorative arts in the United States. In the early 1860s, for instance, Gorham established a photography department in order

Fig. 12 “Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Eighth Street,” in At the Sign of the Golden Eagle, 1810–1912 (New York: Black, Starr & Frost, 1912), 12. Image courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

Fig. 12

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Fig. 13 “Silver Engraving Shop,” in At the Sign of the Golden Eagle, 1810– 1912 (New York: Black, Starr & Frost, 1912), 21. Image courtesy of the Hagley Museum and Library.

Fig. 13

to produce images of its new products, which could then be distributed to travel- ing salesmen and used as a resource in the company’s library.33 Photographs also served as useful study tools in art academies, though not without much debate and at times controversy.34 Describing a studio at PAFA in 1879, just two years after the last class Harnett is recorded to have taken there, art critic William Brownell noted that “around the walls are, perhaps, the most complete collection of carbon photo- graphs from old masters in the country (outside of the Braun agency), and the benefit to be obtained from a study of them, and possibly it would not be too fanciful to say the insensible benefit of a daily view of them, must be of consequence.”35 The photo- graphs were meant to acquaint students with the fine-art canon and, more so, serve as both model and muse. But like the managers of Gorham and other prominent silver manufacturers, American artists also used photography to promote their work. In 1875, for instance, PAFA’s infamous instructor Thomas Eakins enlisted the Braun agency mentioned by Brownell to produce a collotype of his Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) and created a small gray-scale version of the painting to

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facilitate its translation into a black-and-white print.36 For designers and engravers as well as fine artists, then, photography was a tool of mass production. It was not its polish that appealed to or interested them, as scholarship on Harnett has suggested, but its reproductive capabilities and, consequently, the extended access it afforded to what would otherwise be singular and solitary objects.

In recent decades, the photograph’s status as a multiple has been the subject of work by artists and scholars alike.37 But as Geoffrey Batchen’s writing on cartes de visite suggests, discussions of nineteenth-century photography still tend to adhere to art-historical conventions derived from the traditional arts and so prioritize images that deviate from the “norm,” portray noteworthy sitters, or come from noted studio operators.38 Rather than focusing on exceptional cartes de visite, Batchen examines the popular interest in, and socio-economic logic behind, the genre in the nineteenth century. Cartes were the primary form of portraiture in the United States throughout the 1860s and into the early 1870s, when Harnett was working in the silver industry and training in art academies, and their formulaic character offers much insight into the threat photography would have posed to a professionally and academically trained painter like himself.39 Just decades earlier, daguerreotypes had attempted to compete with painting; they could even be hand-painted in color to enliven their subjects and so underscore the uniqueness of the image itself. But cartes de visite embraced and exploited photography’s reproductive capabilities. Using a multi-lens camera and a moving plate holder, successive exposures on a single plate of glass cre- ated eight unique images. These were then mounted on approximately 4 x 2 ½-inch cards that could be distributed to family, friends, and colleagues.

In support of Batchen’s point, it is difficult today to find multiple cartes of a typi- cal bourgeois sitter, but images from single sittings by Abraham Lincoln are plentiful. Harnett’s contemporary John Peto included an engraved reproduction of a Lincoln photographic portrait in more than a few of his still lifes (fig. 14). The cartes that pho- tographer Alexander Gardner produced on August 9, 1863 (figs. 15, 16) illustrate the multiplicity afforded by this popular photographic format. To promote the opening of his new portrait studio in Washington, DC, Gardner had solicited and advertised the US president as his first patron.40 Presented together, the multiple images betray slight shifts in the location of Lincoln’s legs as well as the camera itself, but what stands out overall are the similarities across the pictures. In each, Lincoln assumes the same seated pose, presents a newspaper in his left hand, and holds eyeglasses in his right. Its surface underexposed in the photographic or printing process, the newspaper looks like a blank piece of paper—one that could evoke the Emancipation Proclamation, which Lincoln had issued to great acclaim a mere seven months prior, or the blank card stock on which the photograph itself was pasted. Whether wittingly or not, through this one object, Gardner allegorized both the photographic process and commemorations of the Emancipation Proclamation, and aligned the reproduc- tion and proliferation of images and ideas.

Fittingly, Lincoln is said to have declared of his earlier visit to Mathew Brady’s portrait studio in 1860, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President.”41 Batchen and Andrea Volpe argue that carte-de-visite portrait photographs had politi- cal stakes for bourgeois sitters, too. The relatively generic images formulated and constituted a visual identity for the middle class, one that chipped away at patrician

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Fig. 14 John Frederick Peto, Old Time Card Rack, 1900. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. Acquired 1939. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

Fig. 15 Alexander Gardner, Abraham Lincoln, August 9, 1863. Albumen print on carte-de-visite mount, 4 x 2 ⅓ in. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19206.

Fig. 16 Alexander Gardner, Abraham Lincoln, August 9, 1863. Albumen print on carte-de-visite mount, 4 x 2 ⅓ in. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19208.

Fig. 14

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Fig. 15 Fig. 16

ideals like “individuality, creativity, genius, eternal value, [and] mystery.”42 But as the conventions of photographic portraiture empowered, or at least defined, the middle class, they also threatened to devalue the painted portrait. If photography democ- ratized portraiture, making it available to a broader cross section of the population, it also challenged the significance of underdrawing and paint application, which were the fundamental skills taught in American art academies in the late nineteenth century. In its ability to capture a sitter’s likeness almost instantaneously, photog- raphy obviated the need for the repeated sittings on which painted portraits relied and, by extension, any index of the artist’s hand. While some painters embraced the new technology as a powerful tool and ally in creating accurate likenesses, others, including Rembrandt Peale, asserted painting’s higher goals.43 Writing in The Crayon shortly before Harnett entered art school, Peale claimed that painting, as opposed to photography, could capture all those fleeting and contingent qualities of life that were revealed over time.44 For him and other skeptics of the medium, the wealth of detail that photography afforded was a poor substitute for the intimacy and, thereby, originality of a painted portrait. In just a few years, with the rise of the carte de visite,

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the medium would not only engender a wealth of detail, but a wealth of reproduc- tions, too, and so further increase the distance between artist and sitter as well as that between image and hand. Quantity would, in every way, replace quality as American artists had defined it since the start of the century.

Just as individual photographs may have read as polished and finished surfaces, then, the medium itself would have been understood—by a professional silver engraver and academically trained artist like Harnett—as a technology for producing multiples. It therefore would have been less of a model for his paintings than a challenge for him to overcome. In the midst of this photographic whirlwind, Harnett sought to assert the value and significance of his paintings as unique, hand- made works of art. As he imitated the objects in front of him, Harnett created paint- ings that emphasized and exploited the material properties of paint. By laboriously and meticulously crafting his paintings layer by painstaking layer, he built up the literal depth of the canvas in ways that critics were quick, if not always glad, to rec- ognize. For Harnett and others acquainted with the silver industry, as we have seen, clean and clear lines were a mark of the skill used to produce them. When he turned to painting, trompe l’oeil offered him a way to announce and advertise this aspect of his work—the labor required to create it. That is how Harnett’s most strident support- ers and harshest critics read his paintings, too—as products of his hand.45 Indeed, his detractors said that his paintings were about skill to the detriment of substance. But for Harnett—an artist trained and versed in silver manufacturing, and a man who, for ten years, was immersed in an industry that trumpeted skill above all else—the way in which an object (including a painting) was made could constitute its substance. This is not to say that the subjects he depicted are not important. On the contrary, the literary, manual, and musical devices in his paintings often serve (among other things) as keys to how the paintings—as objects—should be read. And so we can see how Harnett’s sketchbook, and the industrial world onto which it opens up, reveal that his imperceptible brushwork was not a mode of pictorial deception, but a mark of manual production. It was a means to frame the paintings, like the silver wares Harnett worked on as an engraver, as unique and handcrafted works of art.

Just as Black, Starr & Frost exhibited art in order to highlight the craftsmanship of their manufactured products, so did Harnett associate his paintings with silver goods in order to underscore the comparable workmanship of paintings like The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace. The paintings were not intended to be read as illusions or deceptions but as the product of skill, time, and training. His work thus stands in contrast to that of the Peale family at the turn of the nineteenth century, whose trompe l’oeil paintings of everything from family members to other works of art to an exhibition catalogue often carried subtitles like A Deception. According to Wendy Bellion, these paintings participated in a broader culture of images and objects that worked to cultivate critical looking and engaged citizenship.46 Terms like “illusion” and “deception” were not used to describe Harnett’s paintings until well into the twentieth century. Anecdotes about uninitiated viewers touching the paintings did circulate in the artist’s moment, but, for the most part, critics were concerned with how the works were made.47 The term “trompe l’oeil” only came into common cur- rency as a means to describe Harnett’s work in the 1930s, and only in the 1950s, with the first dedicated study of the artist, was Harnett anointed the frontrunner of a

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group of late nineteenth-century American still-life painters that also included John Peto and John Haberle.48

While Harnett clearly shared with these artists an interest in aged, man-made things, his laborious technique brings his work into unexpected dialogue with explicitly labored paintings in other genres, such as the portraits of Thomas Eakins and the landscapes of George Inness. Like Eakins and Inness, Harnett sought to announce the painstaking process used to produce his images through the facture of the paintings themselves. Representative of widely divergent genres, the work of these and other artists reveals the pervasive interest in the materiality of paint in late nineteenth-century America.49 Futher, Harnett’s work helps us understand at least one of the factors behind this interest. Considered together, the sketches for his engravings and his interest in trompe l’oeil reveal the decided pressure that the material and visual culture of mass production exerted on American painting in this era. As industrial mechanization took hold, the commercial marketplace expanded exponentially, as did the images within it. Through his work, Harnett did not seek to prepare the viewer for its deceptions so much as preserve painting’s aesthetic and cultural significance in the face of them. As hyper-realistic images, then, The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace did not attempt to trick the eye, but rather to show their hand.

Nika Elder is a visiting assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of Florida. A specialist in American art from the colonial period to the present, she has published on Ad Reinhardt and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and is currently at work on her first book, “William Harnett’s Curious Objects.”

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NOTES

My deepest gratitude goes to Rachael Ziady DeLue for her support of my research on Harnett and her feedback on earlier incarna- tions of this essay. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the Archives of American Art Journal and editor Tanya Sheehan for their thoughtful and helpful contributions.

1 Black, Starr & Frost, At the Sign of the Golden Eagle 1810–1912 (New York: Black, Starr & Frost, 1912).

2 For readings of Harnett’s paintings in terms of consumer culture, see Michael Leja, “Touching Pictures by William Harnett,” in Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 125–52; David Lubin, “Masculinity, Nostalgia, and the Trompe l’Oeil Still-Life Paintings of William Harnett,” in Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 273–319; and Cécile Whiting, “Trompe l’oeil Painting and the Counterfeit Civil War,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 2 (June 1997): 251–68.

3 Tiffany & Company can neither confirm nor deny that Harnett worked there. The artist’s name does not appear in their employment records, but it is uncertain whether those records account for engravers. According to Paul Raymond Provost, author of the only published essay on Harnett’s experience as a silver engraver, the artist worked at Tiffany & Company in the early 1870s. Provost’s claim is based on the research of Alfred Frankenstein, who wrote the first monograph on Harnett. Paul Raymond Provost, “Burin to Brush: Harnett as an Artisan,” in William M. Harnett, ed. Doreen Bolger, Marc Simpson, and John Wilmerding (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), 131–35.

4 See, for example, Leja, “Touching Pictures by William Harnett”; Lubin, “Masculinity, Nostalgia, and the Trompe l’Oeil Still-Life Paintings of William Harnett”; and Whiting, “Trompe l’oeil Painting and the Counterfeit Civil War.”

5 For accounts of the introduction of mechanical technology into the silver industry, see Charles Venable, Silver in America, 1840– 1940 (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1995); and Barbara McLean Ward and Gerald W. R. Ward, eds., Silver in American Life: Selections from the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1979).

6 E. Taylor Snow, “William Michael Harnett, A Philadelphia Catholic Artist,” American Catholic Historical Researches 10 (April 1893): 74.

7 See Alice Newlin, “Asher B. Durand, American Engraver,” Metropolitan Museum

of Art Bulletin, n.s. I, no. 5 (January 1943): 165. Durand’s expressions of frustration with monogramming came about fifty years before Harnett entered the trade, but can be under- stood to dramatize the difference between engraving for the silver industry and for other entities, such as the United States Treasury, throughout the century.

8 For a discussion of colonial metalwork- ing, see Barbara McLean Ward, “‘The Most Genteel of Any in the Mechanic Way’: The American Silversmith,” in Ward and Ward, Silver in American Life, 17–18. For a discus- sion of Revere’s work in the trade, see Kathryn C. Buhler, Paul Revere, Goldsmith, 1735–1818 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1972).

9 Stephen K. Viktor, “‘From the Shop to the Manufactory’: Silver and Industry, 1800–1970,” in Ward and Ward, Silver in American Life, 29.

10 Harnett’s sketchbook is not paginated. The pages cited in this article adhere to the “sketch” numbers ascribed to the digital reproduction of the book on the Archives of American Art website. See http:// www.aaa.si.edu/collections/items/detail/ william-michael-harnett-sketchbook-3372.

11 “Chronology,” in Bolger, Simpson, and Wilmerding, William M. Harnett, 309–10.

12 Ibid.

13 Doreen Bolger, “The Education of the American Artist,” in In This Academy: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1805– 1976 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1976), 62. For more on the role of drawing in American art schools in the nineteenth century, see Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: 200 Years of Excellence (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2005); Lois Marie Fink and Joshua C. Taylor, Academy: The Academic Tradition in American Art: An Exhibition Organized on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the National Academy of Design, 1825–1975 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975); Mark Mitchell, The Artist-Makers: Professional Art Training in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2002); and Ronald J. Onorato, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Development of an Academic Curriculum in the Nineteenth Century (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1977).

14 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament: Illustrated by Examples from Various Styles of Ornament (London: Day and Son, 1856), 1.

15 Venable, Silver in America, 76.

16 Ibid.

17 Cited in ibid., 76. The contents of the Tiffany & Company library are well docu- mented in that institution’s archive.

18 Venable, Silver in America, 82.

19 For more on Edward C. Moore, see John Loring, Magnificent Tiffany Silver (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001).

20 Snow, “William Michael Harnett, A Philadelphia Catholic Artist,” 74.

21 Douglas R. Nickel, “Harnett and Photography,” in Bolger, Simpson, and Wilmerding, William M. Harnett, 177.

22 Lubin, “Masculinity, Nostalgia, and the Trompe l’Oeil Still-Life Paintings of William Harnett,” 291. On the relationship between Harnett’s work and photography, see also Elizabeth Jane Connell, “After the Hunt,” in Bolger, Simpson, and Wilmerding, William M. Harnett, 277–85.

23 Lubin, “Masculinity, Nostalgia, and the Trompe l’Oeil Still-Life Paintings of William Harnett,” 293. For additional readings of Harnett’s paintings in relation to consumer cul- ture, see Leja, “Touching Pictures by William Harnett”; and Whiting, “Trompe l’oeil Painting and the Counterfeit Civil War.”

24 Leja, “Touching Pictures by William Harnett,” 152.

25 This material has been culled from conservation reports on Harnett’s paintings in the files of the Allen Memorial Art Gallery, Oberlin College; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. For published information on Harnett’s technique, see Jennifer Milam, “The Artist’s Working Methods,” in Bolger, Simpson, and Wilmerding, William M. Harnett, 169–174.

26 “A Fine Still-Life Painting,” Springfield Daily Republican, November 7, 1887, 6.

27 Frank Linstow White, “Art Notes,” Epoch, December 12, 1890, 301. Additional reviews of Harnett’s work that raise the issues of time and skill can be found in the bibliography of Bolger, Simpson, and Wilmerding, William M. Harnett.

28 Venable, Silver in America, 151.

29 Ibid., 151.

30 Ibid., 147.

31 Black, Starr & Frost, At the Sign of the Golden Eagle, 23.

32 See, for example, Lubin, “Masculinity, Nostalgia, and the Trompe l’Oeil Still-Life Paintings of William Harnett,” 291.

33 Venable, Silver in America, 26.

34 See Kathleen Foster, “Photography: Science and Art,” in Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

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(Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 108. Foster discusses French critic Charles Baudelaire’s concerns about the use of photography by artists like Jean-Louis-Ernst Messonier and Jean-Léon Gérôme, Thomas Eakins’s instructor at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris.

35 William Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia,” Scribner’s Monthly 18, no. 5 (September 1879): 739.

36 For more on Braun’s calotype of Eakins’s The Gross Clinic, see Foster, “Photography: Science and Art,” 106–20; and Michael Leja, “Composite Images in a Hybrid Medium by Thomas Eakins and His Contemporaries,” in Shared Intelligence: American Painting and the Photograph, ed. Barbara Buhler Lynes and Jonathan Weinberg (Berkeley: University of California Press; Santa Fe: Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2011), 28–41.

37 See Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 91–101.

38 Geoffrey Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” in Image and Imagination, ed. Martha Langford (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 67–68.

39 Andrea L. Volpe, “Cartes de Visite Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation,” in Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People, ed. Ardis Cameron (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 43.

40 Richard S. Lowry, The Photographer and the President: Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Gardner, and the Images that Made a Presidency (New York: Rizzoli, 2015), 89. For more on popu- lar depictions of Abraham Lincoln, particu- larly within the context of the Emancipation Proclamation, see Harold Holzer, Gabor S. Boritt, and Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (New York: The Scribner Press, 1984); and Harold Holzer, Edna Greene Medford, and Frank J. Williams, The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views (Social, Political, Iconographic) (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).

41 George Alfred Townsend, “Still Taking Pictures,” New York World, April 12, 1891, 26.

42 See Volpe, “Cartes de Visite Portrait Photographs and the Culture of Class Formation,” 42–57; and Batchen, “Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the Bourgeois Imagination,” 63–74.

43 See, for example, Mary Panzer, Mathew Brady and the Image of History (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). In the chapter “Photography and American Art at

Midcentury” (70–91), Panzer discusses profes- sional partnerships between photographers and portrait painters.

44 Rembrandt Peale, “Portraiture,” The Crayon 4, no. 2 (February 1857): 44–45.

45 For critical reviews of Harnett’s paint- ings and their prioritization of skill, see, for example, “Art and Artists,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 16, 1883, 10; “Exposition Art. A Sermon on the Choice of Pictures for the Home,” Minneapolis Tribune, September 12, 1887, 5; and Clarence Cook, “Academy of Design. Fifty-Fourth Annual Exhibition. Fourth Article,” New-York Tribune, April 26, 1879, 5.

46 Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 16.

47 See, for example, the anecdotes discussed by Leja in “Touching Pictures by William Harnett,” 128 and 137.

48 On how Harnett came to be canonized as a trompe l’oeil painter, see the 1935 correspon- dence between gallerist Edith Halpert, who is widely credited with Harnett’s rediscovery, and Everett Austin, then director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, regarding the purchase of The Faithful Colt. See object file, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. For insight into how Harnett came to be associated with Haberle and Peto, see Alfred Frankenstein, After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters, 1870–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953).

49 See Michael Leja, “Eakins’s Reality Effects,” in Looking Askance, 59–92; and Rachael Ziady DeLue, George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

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