American Realism. Gerry Souter
all the rage on the burghers’ walls. Guns of all vintages leaned against drapery or rough wood panelling as game hung head down from lashings and pipes sprouted from tobacco canisters. Baskets, ceramics, brass and hammered tin flasks, pots, covered beer mugs and butchers’ cleavers lay strewn about. Harnett plunged into this œuvre adding Prussian bloody-mindedness to his compositions.
Considered his masterpiece series, after studying in Munich for three years, he began these paintings titled After the Hunt – a common German theme – substituting various objects within the same concept. Dead game hangs in front of an old door surrounded by guns, hats, game sacks, pipes on tethers, dented hunting horns, old-fashioned powder horns, knives and swords. These are large paintings, much larger than his previous works, but displaying the same level of excruciating detail and attention to lighting, texture and spatial relationships.
He also created a series of ‘dining room’ pictures that featured single dead animals: ducks, geese, or rabbits hanging in front of a plain background.
While the German artists preferred more austere scenes of plucked game, and very realistic dead creatures often with wounds showing, Harnett’s Merganser, painted in 1883, portrays an almost balletic duck arrested in a dignified swoon. Nary is a feather ruffled. The layers of feathers beneath the wing are sculpted and its breast is plump and undamaged. One leg is trussed up by a tether to a nail in the wall, but the other hangs languidly apart from the body in a gesture from Swan Lake.
Harnett produced four versions of After the Hunt and was sure this virtuoso demonstration of his skills would create his reputation in the fine art world instead of decorating saloons and billiard halls. He was wrong. Critics still harrumphed and turned away from yet another dead animal picture with no “soul”. In 1886 he returned to New York, set up a studio and continued to paint what and how he knew best.
One of the most recognised paintings from this period is The Faithful Colt, finished in 1890. The subject is an old 186 °Colt Army Model percussion revolver hanging from a nail through its trigger guard. Its treatment resembles the “dining room” pictures of dear game. The old pistol is nickel plated with worn ivory grips and shows wear from firing where gunpowder has pitted the plating where the cylinder meets the barrel’s breech. A general patina has flattened the shine and cracks appear in the grips where they meet the butt strap. An officer or cavalryman in the Civil War might have used this weapon, but at the time of the painting, guns that used loose powder, ball and percussion caps had been made obsolete by cartridges.
This work is one of only ten paintings completed in Harnett’s last four years of life. It was exhibited – like so many of his works – not in a gallery, but in the store window of Black, Starr & Frost, a New York jewellery store. Originally titled The Old-Fashioned Colt, this painting carried a literary title like his other works, After the Hunt, For Sunday’s Dinner, The Old Cupboard and The Old Violin to reduce the “illusionist” stigma that drew yawns from critics as being little more than mechanically slavish copies of nature. In one of his few pronouncements about his work, Harnett further attempted to distance himself from the “deception” artists: “In painting from still life, I do not closely imitate nature. Many points I leave out and many I add. Some models are only suggestions.”[26]
William Michael Harnett, The Old Cupboard Door, 1889.
Oil on canvas, 156.5 × 104.1 cm.
City Art Galleries, Sheffield, England.
William Michael Harnett, Still-Life – Violin and Music (Music and Good Luck), 1888.
Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 76.2 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, Wolfe Fund, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection.
William Michael Harnett, The Old Violin, 1886.
Oil on canvas, 96.5 × 60 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., gift of Mr and Mrs Richard Mellon Scaife in honour of Paul Mellon.
William Michael Harnett, The Faithful Colt, 1890.
Oil on canvas, 57.1 × 47 cm.
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.
In 1886, Harnett developed rheumatoid arthritis and had to be hospitalised to bring down the inflammation. At the age of forty his health declined further when he came down with kidney disease and admitted himself to Saint Francis Hospital in Manhattan. By 1889 his sickness had intensified into acute diffuse glomerulonephritis or inflamed kidneys that can lead to kidney failure. This failure, or uraemia, shuts down the kidney’s ability to clean toxic material from the circulatory system causing nausea, vomiting, anaemia, hypertension, mental dysfunction and strokes.
In that same year his mother, Honora, died. Her pride in his accomplishments as a painter had never wavered and her death left him depressed. Since his father’s death in 1864, Harnett had contributed to the support of his mother and sisters, which, though his paintings had sold well, left him very little spare cash. That summer, he journeyed to spas in Carlsbad and Wiesbaden in Germany to “take the waters” and relieve his crippling rheumatism. The application of hot springs provided some relief, but after returning to New York, his health slipped further downhill. After another hospital stay, he travelled to Hot Springs, Arkansas. That year, he completed only one painting, The Old Cupboard Door.
This small painting includes a potpourri of his favourite subjects – but the choices are steeped in melancholy – from the torn binding of the book dangling by a thread (the frailty of life) to the small Roman figurine of Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry. A violin bow diagonally brings the composition back to centre where it pauses at the circular stained tambourine and then continues along the angled pages pinned to the wood next to the violin. Above Harnett’s dying rose is sheet music for La Dernière Rose d’été, a popular tune of the period where Thomas Moore sees his life in comparison with the last rose of the season. Accepting the metaphoric road signs to mortality, it is at this point when the viewer takes in the overall view and becomes aware that William Harnett’s 1889 painting is virtually a Cubist abstraction. The sophistication of his elements, “… Many points I leave out and many I add…” amounts to a road map for future Cubists, Picasso, Braque, Rivera, Lipchitz and others who might well have seen his work in Europe. Picasso’s Still-Life with Violin and Fruit is a particularly startling comparison.
Following his return from Arkansas, Harnett suffered a stroke on the pavement outside his Manhattan studio and collapsed into a coma. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he died on 29 October 1892. The doctor’s post-mortem examination revealed that Harnett was undernourished and anaemic. His estate amounted to $500 and a few paintings.
As is the case with so many artists underappreciated in their lifetime, his death brought about a re-evaluation of his work and he became – for a brief time – eulogised as one of America’s finest still-life painters. However, the Impressionists and anything French was beginning to devour Manhattan wall space in galleries and museums. Harnett’s quaint still-lifes slipped from favour as relics of the past and for forty years – until 1939 – remained curiosities bundled together with other illusionists and forgeries still relegated to saloons and billiard parlours in small towns.
In 1939 William Michael Harnett’s work was rediscovered and championed by Downtown Gallery owner Edith Halpert in her Greenwich Village establishment. Her interest had been piqued when she saw The Faithful Colt and brokered the sale of the painting to the Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Colt Firearms Manufacturing Company had their headquarters in that city and donated a wing to the Atheneum. Harnett’s painting was a welcome addition to the museum’s collection. Intrigued by Harnett’s work, Halpert began to acquire his paintings and in April 1939
Alfred Frankenstein