William Harnett’s Curious Objects: Still-Life Painting after the American Civil War

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Nika Elder

William Harnett’s Curious Objects

Still-Life Painting after the American Civil War

Nika Elder

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Hardback

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English

University of California Press
22 December 2022

Art & design styles: Modernist design & Bauhaus; Individual artists, art monographs

Admired for his trompe l’oeil style, American painter William Harnett (1848–1892) was as intellectually ambitious as he was technically skilled. The first scholarly monograph on the artist, William Harnett’s Curious Objects details Harnett’s career-long effort to position still life as a serious art.

Nika Elder elevates the significance of Harnett’s academic training and questions his apparent turn away from it. Reading his still lifes in relation to wartime visual culture, literary realism, museum display, and industrial design, she shows how Harnett experimented with inanimate objects and pictorial techniques to represent the human condition without depicting the human body. His paintings illustrate late nineteenth-century American material culture, but they also represent Reconstruction, interiority, death and life, and the imagination. By engaging such lofty themes, Harnett reimagined history painting for the modern era. His work thus locates Gilded Age art and culture in the long shadow of the Civil War and its politics.

By: Nika Elder
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 178mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 816g
ISBN: 9780520386419
ISBN 10: 0520386418
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 22 December 2022
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Nika Elder is Assistant Professor of Art History at American University in Washington, DC.