Of the three major American trompe l’oeil painters of the Nineteenth Century, William M. Harnett (1848‱892), John F. Peto (1854‱907) and John Haberle (1856‱933), the least well known †and in many ways, the most interesting †is Haberle. All three combined masterful technique with images of objects of everyday life to create precise, illusionistic paintings of such astonishing detail and accuracy that the items represented look real.
They carried on a tradition dating back to the Fifteenth Century, which was especially popular in Seventeenth Century Dutch painting. In the United States, the realist strain was notably continued by Charles Willson Peale’s “Staircase Group” of 1795 and son Raphaelle in “After the Bath,” circa 1822. These Philadelphia painters set an example for Harnett and Peto, both from the City of Brotherly Love.
Harnett is recognized for the precision of his compositions, Peto for his inspired use of color and Haberle, from New Haven, Conn., for his inventiveness and sense of humor. As art historian Alfred Frankenstein put it years ago, “Peto is moved by the pathos of used-up things. Haberle is wry and wacky, full of bravado, self-congratulating virtuosity and sly flamboyance. [His work] is poles away from Harnett’s sumptuosity, careful balances and well-modeled volumes, and is equally far from Peto’s sensitivity in matters of tone and hue.”
Haberle, trained as an engraver, is increasingly regarded as the most technically impressive of the three, as well as for a wit that sets him apart from his fellow still life artists. Haberle, for example, was well known for sly, trompe l’oeil depictions of counterfeit bills and of a newspaper article about a master forger sought by law enforcement authorities.
Art historian Milton W. Brown concluded that Haberle’s “art lacks the serious grandeur of Harnett and the sensitive lyricism of Peto, but it offers a waggish imagination.”
Informed, sophisticated, original, gifted and funny, Haberle often invoked complex, ingenious and entertaining aspects of contemporary society during his abbreviated but brilliant career.
All this makes particularly welcome the exhibition “John Haberle: American Master of Illusion,” on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA) through March 11. Organized by the museum with guest curator and longtime Haberle authority Gertrude Grace Sill, who wrote the informative catalog, the show comprises about 20 paintings and drawings on loan from museums across the country. Together, they constitute the first comprehensive study devoted to Haberle.
“Haberle’s work is astonishing in its intensity and in the startling clarity of his vision,” writes NBMAA director Douglas K.S. Hyland. “At first glance, his paintings, unlike those of Harnett and Peto, strike the viewer as lacking in three-dimensional depth, yet the immediacy of this effect only serves to heighten the viewer’s perception.” Observes curator Sill, “While Harnett’s compositions demanded the viewer’s careful attention, Haberle’s were unique in their personal, witty details, often carefully hidden and demanding intense scrutiny.”
Haberle was born in New Haven to German immigrant parents; his father was a tailor with a shop on the Green near the Taft Hotel. His son later recalled that “In those days of the Yale fence and the Yale rushes, my father was kept busy repairing clothing ripped by these rushes, and I have been told by boss tailors that he could do the mending so well that it could hardly be found after it was done.”
Young Haberle, nicknamed “Happy,” left school at 14 to apprentice with local printer, engraver and lithographer Punderson and Crisland; over the course of four years he learned the disciplined hand-and-eye coordination required for detailed representations.
Starting in 1880 he worked for years for famed Yale University paleontologist Otheniel Charles Marsh, founder of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. Haberle painted scenery, illustrated publications, prepared exhibitions and did odd jobs.
Haberle’s sprightly “That’s Me! (Self-Portrait)” of 1882 shows him as a bright-eyed, ebullient, 26-year-old, dressed to the nines and wearing a sporty derby. One senses the intensity and good humor with which he would pursue his career. The curling paper in the upper left, pierced by a tack, suggests this is the artist’s first trompe l’oeil work. An impressively detailed and composed graphite sketch that same year reflects the embryonic artist’s meticulous attention to detail.
During Haberle’s only formal art training †a year in the mid-1880s at the National Academy of Design †he saw trompe l’oeil paintings by Harnett for the first time. “I wanted to do figure work,” Haberle recalled, “but soon found that I was no colorist and sometimes was color blind. So I decided to do still life.”
By the early 1880s, Haberle had acquired skills as a draftsman and engraver that prepared him for a career as an illusionistic painter capable of creating visual artistic jokes. Such work was much prized by businessmen, who hung works on their office walls for amusement and bragging rights, and for display in taverns and other places frequented by men. Although classified as a trompe l’oeil artist, Haberle referred to his style as “artistic mechanics.”
At a time when counterfeiting was serious business †the US Secret Service was established in 1865 to suppress bogus money †paintings featuring US currency were very popular, particularly to decorate saloons. Harnett created the first American currency painting in 1877. When his precisely delineated works were displayed in a New York saloon in 1886, the Secret Service warned him to stop painting money, and Harnett complied.
Haberle, on the other hand, took up the subject with gusto, making US currency a specialty. In 1887, he exhibited a money painting, “Imitation,” at the National Academy of Design. Its painstakingly painted stamps and Treasury notes remain convincing on close inspection. A small tintype of the bewhiskered artist underscores the identity of its creator. (Adjacent display cases contain original currency, stamps and photographs similar to those reproduced in several of Haberle’s paintings, including “Imitation.”)
The purchase of “Imitation” by prominent art collector Thomas Clarke and its subsequent display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts encouraged the painter to continue using money themes in his work. Clarke, who continued to collect and promote the painter’s work, said, “No artist has yet equaled Haberle in imitating bills and stamps.”
Haberle’s next complex canvas on the subject, “Reproduction,” containing currency and stamps and readable newspaper clippings alluding to counterfeiting charges, was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago that same year, 1887.
It was “U.S.A. (The Chicago Bill Picture),” circa 1889, showing a worn $1 bill atop a tattered $10 note, a one-cent stamp, a piece of tape and a newspaper clipping praising “Imitation” that caused the uproar that brought Haberle to national attention. While “U.S.A.” was on display at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1889, a local newspaper critic accused Harberle of perpetuating a fraud by pasting real currency and stamps onto his canvas. Incensed, the artist traveled to Chicago to confront the writer. Using a magnifying glass and paint remover, experts proved the image was indeed fully painted. Within days, the critic retracted his charge, calling the canvas a “true work of imitative art.”
Dubbed by one art historian as an “ironic and comedic tour de force,” “U.S.A.” deliberately sought to goad the government by including the $1 bill’s reverse side with its official warning against imitation of US currency. For years it hung in one of Detroit’s male-only saloons. “U.S.A.” and its attendant brouhaha solidified Haberle’s reputation as the most meticulous painter of currency.
In other nearly perfectly rendered views of currency, Haberle continued to depict the warning against counterfeiting on the reverse side of the $1 bill.
This ploy suggests that the artist was neither shy nor humble about his skills nor afraid of its consequences. When the US Treasury warned him to stop painting money, he just painted more detailed and accurate images. In effect, he flaunted his talent and dared anyone to stop him.
Although he painted currency for only four years, during that time †as the uncannily accurate examples in the New Britain show attest †he created some of the most convincing trompe l’oeil images of American money in history. Said fellow money-painter Harnett, “I have never seen such remarkable reproductive talents anywhere&o artist has yet equaled Haberle in imitation of bills and stamps.”
A founder of the New Haven Sketch Club, Haberle contributed “Fresh Roasted: Peanuts,” 1887, to its exhibition of that year. By utilizing the old trompe l’oeil technique of placing the bin of nuts behind a panel of shattered glass, he added to the illusion of depth, but overall it is one of Haberle’s less successful deceive-the-eye works.
Around this time, Haberle, in his early 30s, married a local woman 14 years his junior; they settled permanently in Morris Cove, a section of New Haven.
During his brief career, Haberle undertook all manner of subjects compatible with deceptive realism †a dueling pistol hanging on a wall that looks like you could reach out and grab it; “Time and Eternity,” depicting a pocket watch, rosary, pawn receipt, playing card and newspaper clipping that symbolize the transience of life; blackboard slates with messily erased chalk marks, and growing out of the late Nineteenth Century Japonisme craze, “Japanese Corner” and “Chinese Firecrackers,” each evoking imports from the Far East.
Haberle invented the use of a painting not in trompe l’oeil style as the central object of a trompe l’oeil composition, as in several fascinating versions of “Torn-In-Transit,” in which the illusion of meticulously painted twine and torn paper wrappings depends for its effectiveness on the fact that the exposed portion of the picture supposedly prepared for shipment is painted in the popular style of a broadly mannered landscape. Haberle slyly established illusionism by means of its opposite technique being juxtaposed. As art historian Matthew Baigell has observed, “These are not landscape paintings but paintings of landscape paintings, and the very effectiveness of the humor is achieved because most of the painting is not trompe l’oeil at all.”
Alas, not in the exhibition are two Haberle standouts.
His autobiographical “The Bachelor’s Drawer,” 1890‱894, is a remarkably complicated and diverse conglomeration of playing cards, tickets, stubs, stamps, currency and other paraphernalia from his lifetime. Curator Sill calls it “a way of summing up his career.” After hanging for nearly a half century in Haberle’s home, this painting is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
It took Haberle two years to complete “Grandma’s Hearthstone,” 1989‱890, largest of all American trompe l’oeil paintings †8 by 5½ feet †which pictures the fireplace of an old-fashioned farmhouse. Logs burning and kettles boiling on the hearth, the mantel above is crowded with souvenirs of generations who have lived in the house. Haberle had the fireplace and surrounding section of wall transported from an old Massachusetts farmhouse to his studio in New Haven. In it, the artist managed to retain amusing illusionistic tricks that work so well in his smaller pieces. Hung in a Detroit saloon, “Grandma’s Hearthstone” was said to have deceived many observers: the fire in the painting fooled a cat into taking naps before it, and people repeatedly tried to brush painted flies off the mantel. It belongs to the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Haberle employed mixed styles in his final work, “Night,” 1909, which, in Frankenstein’s words “is a completely finished picture of an unfinished picture.” (Sill contends it is unfinished.) “Night” is a treasured possession of the host museum.
In the mid-1890s, his eyesight fading, and with it the precision necessary for highly illusionistic work, Haberle continued to paint, but in a freer, less detailed style. Among his later works are loosely executed flower and fruit paintings, often set outdoors.
A resident of the New Haven area all his life, Haberle died in the suburb of Morris Cove in 1933, and was buried in New Haven’s Evergreen Cemetery. By that time his paintings were virtually unknown and remained so until 1948 when Frankenstein, conducting research for a book on still life painters, discovered 30 of his works. Frankenstein’s research, which included interviews with Haberle’s daughter, Vera, living in her father’s house, led him to write extensively about the artist, whom he proclaimed the “greatest American master of the [trompe l’oeil] tradition.” Frankenstein believed Haberle’s wit and imagination were unmatched by other painters.
Art historian E.P. Richardson once wrote that “Haberle was the greatest illusionist, the most uncanny prestidigitator in trompe l’oeil effects, of&⁛his] generation of still life painters.” Echoing those sentiments, eminent historian Lloyd Goodrich wrote that Haberle pushed the “fantastic possibilities” of trompe l’oeil “to the farthest extreme,” [with an] “inventiveness and startling technical feats [that] anticipated surrealism.”
Thanks to Frankenstein’s perseverance in rescuing Haberle from obscurity and Sill’s dogged pursuit of evidence of his life and oeuvre, this exhibition solidifies the artist’s unique place in the front ranks of America’s trompe l’oeil painters. The display underscores the accuracy of Sill’s assertion that “John Haberle [is] the greatest artist in the imitative style this country has ever seen&”
The exhibition travels to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Penn., (April 17⁊uly 11) and the Portland [Maine] Museum of Art (September 18⁄ecember 12).
The 116-page exhibition catalog, written by Sill and fully illustrated, is published by the New Britain Museum and distributed by University Press of New England.
The New Britain Museum is at 56 Lexington Street. For information, 860-229-0257 or www.nbmaa.org .
