American Realism. Gerry Souter

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СКАЧАТЬ in particular dogged William Harnett as well as causing myopia from that close work under flickering gaslight. He was crippled from rheumatism while working over the cramped details in an often chilly room when he could not afford to heat it. His clothes were clean but ‘antique’ in cut.

      Yet, he produced this incredible bounty of work and scholars have filled books with psychological interpretations and picked over into fragments what little documentation of his life exists. His genius is apparent once cut free from the Victorian imposition of romantic values and motivations. Buried in those myriad of details and textures lies his own poetry. For eighteen years, it rang in his ears only.

      William Michael Harnett was born on 10 August 1848 in Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland to William Harnett, a shoemaker, and Honora (known as “Hannah”) Holland, a seamstress, He had an older brother, Patrick, who also became a shoemaker, and two younger sisters, Anne and Ella, who followed their mother into the seamstress trade. So it was in Victorian Ireland that the older brother followed father into the business and the younger brother got the education. The daughters worked for their dowries so they would have some value when married off; but that was in the Old Country. In 1849, the Harnetts packed up and emigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

      A natural talent for drawing must have been revealed in his formative years because in 1866 he entered the antique class at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. There, he laboured over drawing from casts, graduating from sketching bits of the human body up to the full body casts that were required before entering the still-life classes. In 1864 his father had drowned in the Delaware River and Harnett had to work and support his mother and siblings while going to school. Demonstrating his drawing skills, he was able to apprentice himself to the engraving trade, a practical application of his skills. As an apprentice, he began with wood, graduated to copper and steel, and was finally promoted to engraving silver flatware. At the age of twenty he moved to New York in 1869 and worked for the firms Tiffany & Company and Wood & Hughes scribing monograms. It was at the latter firm where he met his lifelong friend William Ignatius Blemly. During their acquaintance, Harnett presented a number of engraved gifts to Blemly that have survived to reveal his gift for skilfully incorporating the decorative motifs of the time with his burin onto everyday objects such as matchboxes and napkin rings.

      Engraving is a nervous, highly controlled art form. A slip with the steel tool on the mirror surface of sterling silver cannot be erased or painted over. Success demands an artisan-craftsman frame of mind to initiate the cut, vary the depth and conclude the line in a single modulated stroke. It is also a tedious art form if the design must be repetitiously applied, as it was with silver eating utensils. Another factor was the design, which might have come from a supplied template rather than his own imagination. To extend his creativity, Harnett began studying painting at New York’s Cooper Union Institute and the New York Academy of Design at night. After a day at his engraver’s bench, the painting classes must have seemed relaxing.

      William Michael Harnett, Job Lot Cheap, 1878.

      Oil on canvas, 45.7 × 91.4 cm.

      Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

      William Michael Harnett, After the Hunt, 1885.

      Oil on canvas, 181.6 × 123.2 cm.

      Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, Mildred Anna Williams Collection.

      William Michael Harnett, After the Hunt, 1883.

      Oil on canvas, 133.3 × 91.4 cm.

      Colombus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, bequest of Francis C. Sessions.

      William Michael Harnett, For Sunday’s Dinner, 1888.

      Oil on canvas, 94.3 × 53.6 cm.

      The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

      The class structure at the National Academy allowed Harnett to progress rapidly straight to sketching advanced sculptures. His chalk and charcoal drawing, Borghese Warrior, demonstrates a gift for observation and an appreciation of the mechanics of anatomy. His use of light shows modulation from upper left to lower right as the single high light source diminishes across the diagonal composition.

      Another motivation to shift over to paint and brush was the advance of technology in the engraving trade. Electroplating, invented in the 1840s, allowed an industrial approach to what had been a hand-executed artisan craft. The assembly line was replacing the artist’s bench. In 1874 Harnett painted his first oil painting – which he was able to sell – of a still-life with a paint tube and grapes.

      The painting is hardly a world beater, but it tapped into a market that had greater promise than the diminishing demand for his engraving skills. The painting also marked an advance beyond the studies offered at the National Academy. It was the practice at that time to offer painting to only the most advanced students. Part-timers like Harnett had to find painting lessons in the atelier of a full time professional artist. He wrote of his frustrations with this arrangement:

      “I ventured to take a course of lessons from Thomas Jensen, who was at that time a famous painter of portraits. I paid him in advance and intended to finish the course, but I couldn’t do it. He didn’t exactly say I would never learn to paint, but he didn’t offer me any encouragement. After I had studied with him for ten days, I asked him how a certain fault of mine could be corrected. I shall never forget his answer.

      “‘Young man,’ he said, ‘the whole secret of painting is putting the right colour in the right place.’

      “The next day I went back to my old way of study.”[24]

      William Michael Harnett, Trophy of the Hunt, 1885.

      Oil on canvas, 107.8 × 55.4 cm.

      The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

      Harnett packed up and moved back to Philadelphia in 1876, rejoining his mother and sisters and enrolling once again in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. By this time, one would imagine he could write his own ticket at the Academy. He was a professional artist, exhibiting and selling his paintings. However, he exhibited and sold mostly in public places: building lobbies, saloons, restaurants and billiard rooms. The critics wrote him off as having little talent other than patience. Trompe-l’œil art had the same reputation as humorous paintings with animals such as Dogs Playing Poker – non-aesthetic placebos for the masses.

      Although he enrolled in life drawing classes at the Academy, Harnett continued to pursue still-lifes as his bread and butter work, seeking out varieties of textures and surfaces that appeared to be totally random. Of his working methods, very little documentation was left behind. Only an observation by his friend Edward Taylor Snow has survived stating Harnett would “make a finished lead pencil drawing with minute details prior to executing a painting”.[25]

      Until infrared reflectography began revealing carbon under painting details, little was known about the sequence of events with that drawing. Today, we can see the СКАЧАТЬ