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PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION, GERMANY
Lot 52
WILLIAM MICHAEL HARNETT(1848-1892)Still Life with Books 28 1/8 x 38 in. (71.4 x 96.5 cm.)
Ending from 18 November 2025, 23:59 EST
New YorkSold for US$229,100 inc. premium
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WILLIAM MICHAEL HARNETT (1848-1892)
Still Life with Books
signed and dated 'HARNETT. / 1881' (lower right)
oil on canvas
28 1/8 x 38 in. (71.4 x 96.5 cm.)
Painted in 1881.
signed and dated 'HARNETT. / 1881' (lower right)
oil on canvas
28 1/8 x 38 in. (71.4 x 96.5 cm.)
Painted in 1881.
Footnotes
Provenance
Private collection, Wiesbaden, Germany, by 1957.
By descent to the present owners within the family of the above.
Throughout his short career, beginning in 1874 until his untimely death in 1892 at the age of 44, William Michael Harnett mastered the trompe l'oeil technique of painting. Unlike his predecessors Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), John Francis (1808-1886), and Severin Roesen (1816-1872), who produced fruit still lifes and floral arrangements, Harnett chose imagery that reflected the modernity of the Gilded Age. Harnett replaced the saccharin and bountiful canvases which reflected a love of natural beauty with depictions of corner desks filled with material objects associated with wealth, prestige, connoisseurship, and excess. These compositions are packed with a combination of bric-a-brac and objets de vertu that defined the educated classes of the age including more common items such as books, sheet music, matches, pipes, quills, and candlesticks, as well as more refined items such as vases, instruments, fine weapons, watches, and of course, money.
In the present work, Still Life with Books, executed in 1881, Harnett renders a desk, cluttered with books, sheet music, a disassembled Piccolo, a Bascinet helmet, brass lamp, and a pseudo-Greek vase. Harnett was a prolific collector of items to use for his still-life's, many of which would be used in multiple compositions, including what appear to be the Piccolo and Bascinet helmet which were incorporated into A Study Table (Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York), executed the following year in 1882. Harnett's attention to detail is particularly noteworthy in the present work with his rendering of the light coming through the window to the left of the viewer, as can be seen by the reflection on the verdigris and brass lamp's shade, as well as the intricate detail on the torn music sheet and music folios.
Chief among his themes, Harnett included musical instruments and sheet music in nearly a quarter of all of his known compositions. An amateur flutist himself, Harnett could likely read music, as his renderings of sheet music are regularly faithful transcriptions of the music, displaying his understanding of the functional meaning of musical signs and notation. According to Marc Simpson, "It is in these depictions of sheet music that Harnett manifests some of his most startling accomplishments, ranging from the purely technical manipulation of paint, so as to suggest light falling on printed paper, to the development of an iconographic program, wherein the choice of melodies demonstrably shades the subtle meanings of his compositions. In addition, Harnett's depictions of music are so faithful to such details as key, meter, and melodic progression that they reproduce staves fully capable of conveying musical messages rather than, as in his paintings of letters and newspapers, merely the texture of black on white. His music is thus playable, and the few measures he provided are usually sufficient to reveal the entire melody to the consciousness of a musically literate viewer. In this manner, the artist crossed the line separating illusion from reality and, by adding the sense of sound to the normal silence of paintings, accomplished by true synaesthesia." (M. Simpson, "Harnett and Music: Many a Touching Melody," William M. Harnett, New York, 1992, p. 289)