Trompe l'oeil painting and the counterfeit Civil War

Without exception, however, trompe l'oeil paintings never take advantage of that opportunity. Typically, the words of the news clipping, as in Harnett's The Faithful Colt, cannot be deciphered, for the artist in such passages uncharacteristically blurs his otherwise precise technique. With the words thus reduced to a mere scumble of gray pigment, written content disappears. And the newspaper clipping in trompe l'oeil pictures accordingly transmogrifies from being a vehicle for a timeless message into just another deteriorating physical artifact: a crumbling, yellowed piece of paper, one more item of the sort that a foot soldier might have tucked away in his backpack before the long march to Gettysburg.

Much like the written word, the engraving of Lincoln by John Buttre that takes its place in many of Peto's trompe l'oeil canvases might seem a means of drawing the past directly into the living present.(20) While, as I argued above, the image marked the irrevocable loss of the man himself, the countenance of the president had, already during the Civil War and certainly by the 1890s, come to symbolize an entire set of Republican political virtues; indeed, the face of the man had over the preceding years assumed the task of representing the nation itself. Writing in the introduction to his Portrait Life of Lincoln of 1910, for instance, Francis Trevelyan Miller, founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of American History, demonstrated how thoroughly the countenance of Lincoln and the values of the nation had become identified with one another:

Throughout my life I have read the anecdotes and biographies that make him familiar to the generations, but it was not until I looked upon his portraits that I began to understand the real character of the man. It was then, as Bartlett, the sculptor has said, that I looked into a face in which is written the history of a nation and the hopes of its people - the face of democracy.(21)

To the extent that the image of Lincoln had already emerged during the Civil War as a symbol of the republic, the reiteration of that face as a symbol in trompe l'oeil painting would have lost none of its larger resonance - indeed, it had gained some - by the 1890s.

And yet, once again, trompe l'oeil canvases stymied the capacity of this special artifact to evoke the past fully in the present. In Peto's paintings the engraved image of Lincoln typically blurs somewhat, like a photograph out of focus. Simultaneously, the paintings maintain a greater degree of clarity when they render the tears and creases, the spots of discoloration, and the general yellowing of paper on which these fading images appear. The paintings, in short, draw attention to the engravings as physical artifacts from the past rather than as images of Lincoln holding currency in the present. The emphasis on the tactile surface qualities of the paper and the clouding of Lincoln's face, most extreme in Lincoln, and the Phleger Stretcher of 1898 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED], had the effect of converting the engraving from a symbol of national values into an aged object like all of the other items depicted in the canvas.