Still Life

Still Life (1875) by William Harnett, now in the collection of Reading Public Museum, demonstrates the artist's skill in the still life genre, transforming everyday objects or natural specimens into studies of color, light, and painterly observation. William Harnett was the leading American practitioner of trompe l'oeil — 'fool the eye' — still life painting, a genre that challenged viewers to question where painted illusion ended and physical reality began. His compositions of musical instruments, old books, meerschaum pipes, and currency were so realistic that the U.S. Treasury Department once investigated him for the suspiciously convincing quality of his painted banknotes.

Harnett executed his trompe l'oeil still lifes with painstaking technical precision, building up glazed layers of oil paint to render the textures of wood, metal, leather, and paper with deceptive accuracy.