Job Lot Cheap, a Realistic Oil on Canvas Painting by William Harnett

Job Lot Cheap by William Harnett, from the Reynolda House Museum of American Art

JOB LOT CHEAP, a realism oil painting by: William Harnett in 1878

When I was young, my neighbor tried to whet my interests in art by showing me this massive art history book filled with images of old European paintings. But old oil paintings of people and places I didn’t understand, reproduced in black and white photographs, meant almost nothing to me. It wasn’t until my school teacher dragged us to the local art museum and I noticed what other little boys saw, a painting by William Harnett, that I started to understand when art mattered to people.

Harnett’s work spoke to little boys and grown men (and to the occasional woman). Harnett painted pipes, guns, violins, books piled on tables, animals shot on a hunt; the hard, masculine objects that men and boys find so attractive. These days, his work may seem quaint in a world where any young boy can take on an apocalyptic world filled with zombies just by inserting a video game, but Harnett’s masculine, detail obsessed trompe d’oil is still an open window for people to access if they prefer to view their art with less emotion, but with a highly attractive sense of detail.

Harnett’s work is often measured in comparison to the work of his friend John Peto, another trompe d’oil painter who focused on the tastes of late 19th century manhood. But Peto was Philadelphia born and raised while Harnett came from a different situation. His family was among the hundreds of thousands of starving Irish who fled the potato famine that had raced across Ireland in the late 1840’s, destroying Ireland’s singular crop economy.The family fled to Pennsylvania. There, Harnett pursued a craft job as an engraver before taking classes at the Pennsylvania School of Design, then America’s greatest art school. As an adult, he then pursued his artistic craft in New York. Ironically, Peto, five years younger than Harnett, took the same steps.

In the late 19th century, America was buying up Europe’s art treasures and storing them in gaudily designed mansions of the Gilded Age. What the rich mostly pursued was the best of European art. To them, American art was considered second rate and the work of artists like Harnett and Peto was even less impressive. Still, in big cities like New York and Philadelphia, there was a market for trompe d’oil drenched in exclusively male tastes. Well-off, middle class men, not industry titans, were the primary market for these works.

To many young boys, Harnett’s painting, The Faithful Colt, portrays a basic fantasy; not of a young horse, but of a well made revolver, hanging from a nail in the wall. For me, now that I am older and prefer less explosive hobbies, I really like his painting, Job Lot, Cheap. The title is taken from a few stray words hand-written on a sign at the bottom of the painting. It shows a pile of books for sale. They are obviously not displayed for maximum sales but are ina rather disheveled pile as if it no longer mattered whether they were purchased or burned.

That, in a nutshell, seems to be one of the historical attractions to Harnett’s and Peto’s works. Some people believe that they vaguely represent a world that existed before mass production. Still, Harnett’s Colt revolver, while aging, was still a marvel of mass production. It seems to me that what history celebrates as our greater paintings come more from what the later viewers want to read into the painting than what the artist intended at the time. How we choose to interpret our artistic history becomes as important as how it was originally made.

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