John Frederick Peto spent the majority of his career working in relative obscurity in the small coastal town of Island Heights, New Jersey, away from mainstream art circles. However, he is recognized today as one of America’s foremost exponents of trompe l’oeil still life, a mode of painting that was highly popular during the late nineteenth century, practiced by the likes of William Harnett (1848-1892) and John Haberle (1856-1933). Peto’s artfully composed still lifes, which range from the whimsical to the meditative, are comprised of worn, commonplace objects that, through a skillful manipulation of color, form and composition, he imbued with deeper meaning, all the while impressing us with his ability to obscure the boundaries between reality and illusion.
John F. Peto was born in Philadelphia on 21 May 1854, one of four children of Thomas Hope Peto, a picture-frame gilder and dealer, and his wife Catherine. He spent part of his childhood living with his grandmother, Mrs. William Hoffman Ham, during which time he developed an interest in drawing and, following the example of his father, learned to play the coronet. Although his contemporaries described him as a self-taught artist, Peto is known to have attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1877 to 1879, where he met and became friendly with the aforementioned Harnett. Between 1879 and 1887 he exhibited several still lifes at the academy’s annual exhibitions, as well as at the Philadelphia Society of Artists and at Earle’s Galleries.
Peto’s early still lifes consisted of arrangements of Victorian objects and bric-a-brac that reveal the influence of Harnett, whose technique and iconography were frequently copied by other artists. However, by the late 1880s, as he matured as an artist, his work became increasingly inventive and highly personal in tone. While both men favored close-up, informal arrangements of objects related to the male preserve, such as pipes, beer mugs and newspapers, their styles were quiet different, Peto preferring soft contours, thickly painted surfaces, a concern for light effects and a bright palette while Harnett favored tight designs, crisp brushwork, deep hues and a polished surface.
In addition to conventional tabletop still lifes, John F. Peto liked to paint colorful and sometimes humorous illusionistic card racks in which fairly shallow objects such as letters, cards and photographs are shown mounted bulletin-board fashion and appear to project forward from the picture plane, as evident in works such as Rack Picture for William Malcolm Bunn (1882; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.); notable for their near-abstract designs, their arrangements of overlapping forms and their striking patterns, textures and coloration, these paintings reveal Peto’s sensitivity to the same pictorial concerns that would be explored by a later generation of modernist painters such as Pablo Picasso. Peto’s oeuvre also includes portrayals of well-used objects hanging on old doors or wall boards or arranged in shadowy settings, among them such well known oils as The Old Violin (ca. 1890; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); these paintings convey a melancholic beauty and a poignant sense of the passage of time that was quite different from the cheerful and sharply painted still lifes produced by the majority of the artist’s colleagues.
While Harnett enjoyed a steady flow of patrons throughout his career, as well as widespread recognition from both the public and the art press, John F. Peto worked in isolation, often taking commissions for painted and photographic portraits in order to support himself. In 1889, after spending two year commuting from Philadelphia, he moved permanently to Island Heights where he made a living by playing coronet for the Island Heights Camp Meeting Association, a religious organization. He continued to paint but shunned the major national annuals in favor of informal exhibitions at inconspicuous venues such as the local drugstore, where he sold his still lifes to friends, local merchants and summer tourists. In contrast to most artists, Peto did not leave any record books or inventories, nor did he make any comments on his work or on art in general.
He died in 1907 in New York City, his final years complicated by personal problems, including a lawsuit over an inheritance and complications from Bright’s Disease, a painful kidney ailment.
In 1905 a Philadelphia-based art dealer purchased a number of Peto’s still lifes and forged Harnett’s name to them. These works eventually commanded high prices and were acquired by major institutions and collectors. The “deception” went unnoticed until 1949, when the scholar Alfred Frankenstein identified about twenty paintings attributed to Harnett as Peto’s, basing his conclusions on a comparison of style and choice of pigment; his groundbreaking work marked this talented artist’s subsequent rediscovery by the art world, bringing him to the forefront of the tradition of trompe l’oeil painting in the United States. 1
Examples of John F. Peto’s work can be found in major public collections throughout America, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Art Institute; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Museum; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.
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[1] See Alfred Frankenstein, "Harnett: True and False," Art Bulletin 31 (March 1949): 38-56, and more recently, John Wilmerding's Important Information Inside: The Art of John F. Peto and the Idea of Still-Life Painting in Nineteenth Century America (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1983).
