Imitation

John Haberle, with his contemporaries William Harnett and John Peto, was one of the most important trompe l'oeil still-life painters in late nineteenth-century America. Of them, Haberle was specially noted for his style (the microscopic painting of detail) and for his favorite subject (money). He was also an artist of great aesthetic sensibility and inventive power, as seen in the refined and subtle compositional arrangement of Imitation. Judging from the multileveled plays on reality and identity in Imitation—his signature, the imitated clipping on the imitated frame, and the imitated tintype portrait photograph—he was also richly endowed with a keen wit and intelligence.

When Imitation was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1887, it became the first of Haberle's trompe l'oeil paintings to receive public recognition. It was acquired from the exhibition by the most important collector of American art of the period, Thomas B. Clarke (one of Winslow Homer's principal patrons). Clarke reported that the painting, "which created so much talk in the National Academy of Design," was particularly admired by William Harnett, who "said that he had never seen such reproduction anywhere." [1]

Among its many virtues, Imitation is in a pristine state of preservation. It is unlined and has its original varnish and frame, which still bears Thomas B. Clarke's monogram.

(Text by Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., published in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue, Art for the Nation, 2000)

1. Quoted in Gertrude Grace Sill, John Haberle, Master of Illusion [exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts Springfield] (Springfield, Mass., 1985), 49.

Credit: New Century Fund, Gift of the Amon G. Carter Foundation