A PAIR OF TRICKSTERS: PETO AND HABERLE
by Libby Clay
Trompe l'oeil, the illusion of three-dimensional reality on a flat surface, was the traditional goal of artists in the western world until fairly recent times. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, a number of American painters carried the imitation of nature to the point where their works literally did fool the eye. William Harnett is considered the father of this school, and is probably the best known of these virtuosos. While MAG does not own a Harnett, it has two wonderful examples of trompe l'oeil by John Frederick Peto and John Haberle.
Ironically, Peto and Haberle, so well known now, had both slipped into obscurity until about forty years ago. The skillful sleuthing of Alfred Frankenstein, researching for his book After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters 1870-1900, brought them back into the limelight.
John Peto was born in Philadelphia in 1856, the son of a framer and gilder, restauranteur and fire engine salesman. Perhaps his exposure to the pictures in his father's shop and to the glitter of the gaudy fire engines, not to mention the Philadelphia Fire Department Band, led to Peto's dual choice of careers. He became both a painter and a cornet player. (A cornet hangs in MAG's painting.) He divided his artistic time between Philadelphia and Island Heights, NJ, where his cornet led the singing at camp meetings, and summer visitors bought his paintings. Eventually he spent more and more time at Island Heights and gradually lost contact with the art world. He was almost completely forgotten long before his death in 1907.
Peto and Harnett were apparently good friends, and Harnett's was the strongest influence on Peto's career. However, while they often used the same iconography in their paintings, Peto had his own style. Where Harnett chose to paint cherished antiques, such as a violin or books with legible bindings, Peto chose the romanticism of cast-offs, old relics, a rusty gun or a battered cornet. Peto's drawing, choice of color and application of paint were poles apart from Harnett's. Yet, ironically, when Peto slipped from memory, many of his surviving paintings were forged with Harnett's signature, for Harnett's name commanded a much higher price. (In her handwriting under the lining of MAG's picture, Peto's daughter testified that her father painted Articles Hanging on a Door.)
When Frankenstein began his research, John Haberle was known only through two small paintings in the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. By the time After the Hunt was published in 1953, the number of known Haberles had grown to twenty-six, no doubt a small fraction of his output. Virtually nothing had been known about the artist, but Frankenstein found that he was born in New Haven, CT, in 1856 and died there in 1933. Frankenstein was able to interview one of Haberle's daughters who still lived in the family home, and the house was still filled with paintings, clippings, and memorabilia. Family interviews told him that, before taking up painting, Haberle worked as a preparator for a famous Yale paleontologist, cleaning fossils, mounting skeletons, etc. Later, as an art student, he was unable to afford a model, so sketched his own hands, arms and legs.
If Harnett is the master of careful balances and three-dimensional spatial relationships, and Peto the master of sensitivity to color, Haberle is the master of the painted line, with a minimum of modeling and no exploitation of color or tone. His paintings bestow dramatic qualities on the mundane—a comb, a ticket stub, a torn label. In addition, his entire trompe l'oeil oeuvre is humorous. Illusionism is trickery, and trickery itself involves humor.
Torn in Transit is a painting within a painting, for its "torn wrappings" reveal a landscape, rather amateurishly painted. The landscape contrasts with the perfection in the torn paper, labels, and the precisely painted strings which cast shadows on the package. The landscape takes up about four-fifths of the entire image, and we have a trompe l'oeil work most of which is not trompe l'oeil at all. Torn in Transit has continued to delight gallery goers since its 1965 acquisition. According to docent Shirley Somers, it once hung without its Plexiglas cover, and appeared so real that people just had to touch it—hence the added protection.
Harnett and Haberle both ran into trouble with the Secret Service for their realistic painting of money. They were forbidden to paint American currency, under threat of all the penalties listed on the real bills. Haberle had his revenge, incorporating into one of his paintings the reverse side of a five dollar bill, copying exactly the penalties printed there. It apparently escaped the notice of the Secret Service, as they were not in the habit of frequenting art museums. Haberle had the last laugh.
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