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

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...