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Trompe l'oeil painting and the counterfeit Civil War
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1997 by Cecile Whiting
A genuine old Gettysburg relic. If the canvas could hold a nail, we would say that the revolver itself was only hung on it. See the newspaper remarks attached to the painting.
So claimed the text beneath the title of William Harnett's The Faithful Colt [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], a trompe l'oeil canvas of 1890, in a catalogue for an auction in February 1893, which offered for sale this picture along with the rest of the paintings and artifacts remaining in the artist's studio following his death.(1) The short passage commences by seeming to subscribe to the illusion of the painting, offering forth "a genuine old Gettysburg relic" as if the gun depicted at the center of the picture were itself being tendered for sale. Even the fictional presentation of that aging artifact undoubtedly would have evoked for many of its viewers at the end of the nineteenth century the battles of the Civil War, in which revolvers of this sort had, in the language of myth and reminiscence, so faithfully served. By the era of this painting and its posthumous auctioning, of course, many of the actual events and political passions of the Civil War had lost their sense of immediacy. The war had faded into memory as veterans grew older, and beyond memory when they (like Harnett) died, while a new generation of Americans who had not actually experienced combat came of age. Nevertheless, far more than our war of the 1960s continues to haunt our 1990s, the residual issues and conflicts of the Civil War - race relations, regional tensions, unappeased mourning for the dead - continued to shape political and social life in the United States through the end of the century. Indeed, the 1890s witnessed a flourish of new retrospective interest in the war, as monuments and memoirs attempted to probe the traumas and relive the adventures of the fratricidal armed conflict, drawing its lessons into the present before they were lost forever in the recesses of the fading past. Among these retrospective efforts, cumulatively, concerted attempts to re-create the real events of the war played with and against accounts that in contrast presented themselves as the stuff of illusion, either mythic or polemical. Much of the retrospective task in the 1880s and 1890s involved determining where the truth about the war from the past ended and where the illusions created about it afterward began.(2)
Oddly, perhaps, the second sentence of the entry from the auction catalogue would seem to place Harnett's painting on the wrong side of the division between truth and illusion. "If the canvas could hold a nail, we would say that the revolver itself was only hung on it," admits the catalogue with its surprising conditional. The canvas (or at least its wooden support) could actually "hold a nail," but in fact it does not; this nail is only an illusion, and thus so, too, must be the revolver, which otherwise, "we would say," hangs on it. Caught in the tortured logic of its own prose, the text next appears to appeal to outside authority to resolve the confusions: "See the newspaper remarks attached to the painting." But this proves no help, since Harnett rendered the newspaper clipping - by appearances "attached" to the picture but actually part of it - as an illegible blur. Trompe l'oeil paintings from the end of the nineteenth century that evoked the Civil War, by Harnett and by others such as George Cope, John Peto, and Alexander Pope, may have joined the general swirl of activity memorializing the receding conflict, but they did so with much of the same rhetorical knottiness and lack of resolution exemplified by this passage of catalogue text.(3) Where most other visual remembrances of the Civil War displayed their own interpretations in the present as the truth about the past, the trompe l'oeil paintings kept reality and illusion, and thus also the past and present, in delicate equilibrium.
It would be tempting to surmise that the canvases by Harnett and his colleagues corresponded in some more direct fashion to the reality about the status of the Civil War at the end of the nineteenth century as simultaneously present and absent, in both temporal and ontological senses. However, such a conclusion would only have me replicating the forced resolutions of most other memorializing activity, while also elevating trompe l'oeil pictures over all those other artifacts as some sort of embodiment of a higher truth. I would like, rather, to keep the uncertainties of trompe l'oeil paintings alive and unresolved and, more important, to examine their efficacy. For what set of purposes did this set of paintings distinguish itself from other Civil War imagery? Who, I will ask at the end of this paper, could manage the ambiguities of these canvases? Who could read their inconstant message about the Civil War? Who could put the enigmas of the paintings to greatest profit? Ultimately, I will argue, trompe l'oeil painting stood less in conflict with other memorializing artifacts than as a complement to them; viewers of the two together could both revere the heroism of their nation's past and become intrigued by the fabrication of that ostensibly truthful illusion.(4)
