An Evening's Comfort

According to William H. Gerdts, the present work "is an exquisite piece of pure workmanship...[Harnett] wanted to create the ambiguity of reproduction so exact as to be a simulacrum of the original, but yet to be a 'work of art' rather than mere transcription, by not being life-size...The newspaper and the pipe, tobacco and matches was a new form in American still life...but the older objects, the copper tankard and the book of Dante are objects de virtu of a kind which became important to him in Munich...he contrasts the past and present. There are two kinds of reading matter—one a book of great age which will endure forever; the other, a newspaper which is of the moment" (unpublished letter, 1985).