Late Nineteenth-Century Trompe L'Oeil and Other Performances of the Real

Extract

“We live in an age of wonders!” exclaims a character in Henry James's The Bostonians (1886). And so it must have seemed to any American who could read the newspapers, which thrived, in the 1880s, on the business of proclaiming marvels. In The Bostonians one of the “wonders” is Miss Verena Tarrant, whose precocious and hypnotic speaking powers on the subject of women's rights — together with a pretty face and trim figure — succeeded in selling out the Boston Music Hall. Other wonders of the decade were less comely but more enduring: the lightbulb, the electric generator (which so awed Henry Adams), the telephone, the automobile, motion pictures, the linotype machine, the Kodak camera. The hawking of Verena Tarrant outside the Music Hall followed the American pattern of packaging, promoting, and generally celebrating (in a chauvinistic spirit) all manner of sensational feats, new technologies, and even writers and painters who caught the public's fancy. One of these was, of course, Mark Twain, who successfully promoted his own works through direct subscription sales. Also included among the sensational feats of the period were the trompe l'oeil (trick of the eye) still-life paintings by William Michael Harnett, who was heralded in a feature article that appeared in the New York News at the end of the decade. The headline ran as follows:

Painted Like Real Things. The Man Whose Pictures Are a Wonder and a Puzzle. How He Began and the Success He Has Met With — Poverty Forced Him to Earn a Living in the Line in Which He Excells.