William Michael Harnett (1848-1892)

Alfred Frankenstein writes of Sporting Still Life and Still Life, "These two pictures seem to have been intended as a pair. They are identical in size, and while both retain Harnett's devotion to the deep niche at the right, they are balance compositionally in certain other respects." He goes on to write of Sporting Still Life, "Harnett delights in pipes and cigars, but [Sporting Still Life] is teh only known painting by him to represent cigarettes, which in his time were on the race, sinful side." (The Reality of Appearance: The Trump L'Oeil Tradition in American Painting, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1970, p. 78)