Still Life with Le Figaro

Painted in 1882, William Michael Harnett’s Still Life with 'Le Figaro' belongs to a special series of still life paintings the artist began that year in Munich featuring a red lobster as the central element. There are six known works in the series, two of which are in the collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama. The present example was praised by renowned Harnett scholar Dr. Alfred Frankenstein as "very detailed and beautiful. Particularly charming." (unpublished letter, 1967)

Harnett studied the Dutch Old Masters while in Munich, and it is possible his lobster paintings were inspired by Abraham van Beyeren’s Large Still-Life with Lobster (1653, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany). Similar to the Old Master tradition, Harnett’s Munich still lifes are all executed in smaller-than-life scale to create gem-like compositions. William Gerdts writes, “In Munich, Harnett acquired a finesse and elegance of technique, and at the same time he created compositions, which were themselves filled with antique and pseudo antique bric-a-brac, often of the seventeenth century, paintings that both naturally resembled seventeenth-century still lifes and included objects sought after by collectors as antiques.” (Painters of Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life: 1801-1939, Columbia, Missouri, 1981, p. 158)

Further revealing his European influence is the inclusion of the French newspaper, Le Figaro, placed beneath the lobster's striking red shell. A common motif in Harnett's trompe l’oeil works, contemporary ephemera in the form of a newspaper adds a layer of realism that elaborates upon his precise visual illusions.