William Har­nett (1848–1892) was an Irish-Amer­i­can painter of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, whose fame may not have with­stood the pas­sage of time very well but who nonethe­less was respon­si­ble for some excel­lent work in the trompe l’œil still life genre. Trompe l’œil, mean­ing “deceive the eye” in French, is a style of paint­ing that seeks to cre­ate a high­ly real­is­tic, three-dimen­sion­al depic­tion of objects, using per­spec­ti­val illu­sion­ism.

The Old Vio­lin is one of Har­net­t’s most famous paint­ings and a superb exam­ple of paint­ed real­ism. The sub­ject is decep­tive­ly sim­ple; a vio­lin, ren­dered in actu­al size, a sheet of music, a small news­pa­per clip­ping, and a blue enve­lope are shown against a back­ground formed by a green and rusty-hinged wood­en door. It cre­at­ed a sen­sa­tion when first exhib­it­ed at the Cincin­nati Indus­tri­al Expo­si­tion in 1886, where view­ers were enthralled by the tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty of the pic­ture. A local news­pa­per report­ed that “a police­man stands by it con­stant­ly, lest peo­ple reach over and attempt to see if the news­pa­per clip­ping is gen­uine by tear­ing it off”.

Along with oth­er Har­nett pic­tures that con­vinc­ing­ly tricked view­ers’ per­cep­tions, The Old Vio­lin aroused con­sid­er­able con­tem­po­rary debate about the aes­thet­ics of imi­ta­tive art­work. The genre is hard­ly unprece­dent­ed, how­ev­er – there’s a great lit­tle sto­ry in Greek myth about the 5^th cen­tu­ry BC con­test between painters Zeux­is and Par­rha­sius. The con­test was to deter­mine which of the two was the most real­is­tic painter. When Zeux­is unveiled his paint­ing of grapes, they appeared so real that birds flew down to peck at them. But when Par­rha­sius, whose paint­ing was con­cealed behind a cur­tain, asked Zeux­is to pull aside that cur­tain, the cur­tain itself turned out to be a paint­ed illu­sion, and Par­rha­sius won the con­test.

Back to The Old Vio­lin…note how every ele­ment of grain and worn area of the vio­lin is repro­duced in impec­ca­ble detail. The age of the vio­lin is clear­ly key; as Har­nett him­self said: “As a rule, new things do not paint well; I want my mod­els to have the mel­low­ing effect of age”. Well said!

The paint­ing is cur­rent­ly held in the Nation­al Gallery of Art, Wash­ing­ton DC, and, although there is no longer a need for it to be guard­ed from touch by a less cred­u­lous audi­ence of mod­ern times, I for one will pay my regards to this charm­ing still life should I ever be pass­ing through Wash­ing­ton.