Benchmark- Personal Worldview PaperAs a nurse leader, it is impo

Benchmark- Personal Worldview Paper
As a nurse leader, it is important to understand a variety of
leadership models and styles. This will help you adapt to
different settings and apply strategies to support and inspire
others. It may also be necessary to apply models in different
professional settings to satisfy certification requirements. Write
a 1,250-1,500-word paper about your personal model of
leadership, including the following:
Model of Leadership: Part A
- Describe your personal model of leadership.
- Compare your personal leadership model to servant leadership,
transformational leadership, and at least one other model of
leadership.
- How does your personal model of leadership prepare you to
employ strategies for effectively leading diverse teams and
fostering interdisciplinary collaboration as you implement your
leadership project?
Personal Worldview: Part B
- Describe your personal worldview. Include the religious
(Christian), spiritual, and cultural elements that you think most
influence your personal philosophy of practice and attitude
towards leadership.
- Describe how your professional leadership behaviors inspire
others.
Use a minimum of three peer-reviewed resources (published
within the last 5 years) as evidence to support your views.
Prepare this assignment according to the APA guidelines found
in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.
An abstract is not required. This assignment uses a rubric.
Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to
become familiar with the expectations for successful
completion.
You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite.
Benchmark Information

This benchmark assignment assesses the following
programmatic competencies:
MSN Leadership in Health Care Systems
6.3: Employ strategies for effectively leading diverse teams and
fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.
6.7: Model professional leadership behaviors to motivate and
inspire others.
Rubric
Rubric Criteria
Personal Model of Leadership
13.5 points
Leadership Model Comparison (B)
13.5 points
Diverse Teams and Interdisciplinary Collaboration
9 points
Personal Worldview
13.5 points
Inspiration (B)
13.5 points
Thesis, Position, or Purpose
6.3 points
Development, Structure, and Conclusion
7.2 points
Evidence
4.5 points
Mechanics of Writing
4.5 points
Format/Documentation
4.5 points
Total90 points
ARTS 1A

Topic 5: Still Life
First, watch the following short video, “Cézanne’s
Still Lifes at His Studio: Aix-en-Provence, France”:
https://youtu.be/B2m1FKbbkjY
https://youtu.be/B2m1FKbbkjY
Pair 1: Cézanne and Chardin
Paul Cézanne
I. Still life is a subject category in which the representation
inanimate objects is the most important aspect of the work of
art. Students who attended art school in France in the
nineteenth century spent a good deal of time painting objects,
ultimately to demonstrate to their teachers that they could
convey a sense of three-dimensionality on a flat surface. Most
students attempted to create the illusion of three-dimensionality
through careful consideration of light value while depicting
shadows and highlights. By contrast, Paul Cézanne chose to
model objects with color in addition to light value.
Paul Cézanne
Still Life with Apples and Pears

c. 1891-92
Oil on canvas
II. One of the reasons Cézanne’s still life paintings are
considered visually powerful is because he chose to use colors
that were mixed with very little black or white paint. Color
intensity refers to the degree of purity of a color. Cézanne’s
Still
Life with Apples and Pears is an example of a painting in which
the color intensity is strong. The shadows cast by objects are
not
produced with greys but with violets, blues, and greens. The
brightest highlights on the objects are not produced with white
but with different versions of yellow.
Jean-Baptise-Siméon Chardin
I. More than a century and a half before Cézanne produced
Still Life with Apples and Pears, another academically-trained
French painter, Chardin, produced a still life painting,
Attributes
of the Painter, which represents materials and tools used by oil
painters. Oil paint is a painting medium in which pigment is
mixed with linseed oil. Oil paint is known for its tendency to
dry slowly; for its translucent quality; for the wide variety of
colors that may be produced with it; and for its ability to be
used in varying qualities of thickness or thinness.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin
Attributes of the Painter
1725-1727
Oil on canvas
II. A look at one of the objects in this still life—the painter’s
palette—reveals three colors placed next to each other which
are considered primary colors: those colors (red, yellow, and
blue) from which all other colors may be made. While
Chardin’s still life is produced largely by means of earth colors
like brown and red, the light blue color of the rolled-up paper
to the right of the palette indicates that the artist attempted to
balance this composition by offsetting the warm reds at the left
with a cool blue at the right.
Analysis Exercises: Pair 1
Exercise 1: Who was likely to purchase a still life painting from
Cézanne? Or from Chardin? Provide a rationale for your
response, based on the works of art themselves.
Exercise 2: Why do you think so many artists throughout hi story
have used fruit as a still life subject?
Exercise 3: Both Chardin and Cézanne were oil painters, a
painting medium recognized in part for the wide variety of
colors
that may be produced with it. How did these artists approach

color differently?
Pair 1
Pair 2: David Bailly and Rebecca Scott
David Bailly
I. David Bailly was a seventeenth-century Dutch artist who
produced still life paintings which served to encourage people
to
consider their attitudes about money and ambition. Such works
are called vanitas paintings. Vanitas is a theme within literature
and art which warns about the emptiness of wealth and power.
By
the time Bailly produced Vanitas Still Life of 1651, The
Netherlands had become the most wealthy county in Europe due
to its participation in the global mercantile economy, based in
large part on colonialist practices.
David Bailly
Vanitas Still Life
1651
Oil on wood

II. David Bailly included objects in this still life which ask
viewers to consider their mortality. Such objects are called
memento mori, which means “be mindful of your own
mortality”. The candle has been snuffed out, the bubbles are
about to burst, the flower is dying. But the most obvious
memento mori is a skull. Dutch patrons of vanitas paintings
were
usually religious people who believed in an afterlife and felt
that
it was better to give one’s money to charity than get bogged
down by it during one’s lifetime. On illusionistically painted
“paper” in the lower right corner the artist has painted the
words
“VANITAS VANITUM ET OMNIA VANITAS,” which means
”Vanity, vanity. All is vanity,” a quote from the ancient Jewish
king Solomon found in the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Rebecca Scott
I. Like David Bailly, British contemporary artist Rebecca Scott
paints still life works to encourage viewers to consider or
reconsider their values. Her oil painting, Oh, it’s a perfect day,
is
from a series she calls “Perfect Life.” She finds inspiration for
this
series in photographs of expensive luxury objects in commercial
home furnishing catalogues. Fine bedding and fashionable
tableware figure prominently in these works.
Viewers may feel tempted simply to enjoy the appearance of
luxury objects in Scott’s paintings, just one’s eyes may find
pleasure in the painted objects in David Bailly’s still life. But

like
Bailly, Scott’s intention is to call out viewers for their
materialism, challenging them to ask, Does the acquisition of
expensive tableware define a perfect life?
Rebecca Scott
Oh, it’s a perfect day
From the “Perfect Life” series
2005
Oil on canvas
II. Rebecca Scott’s technical approach to oil painting is
painterly, that is, it calls attention to large brushstrokes as
evidence of the act of painting. David Bailly, on the other hand,
concealed his brushwork, painting with tiny, fine strokes.
Moreover, the table top in Rebecca Scott’s Oh, it’s a perfect
day reveals the artist’s wide command of color, including
secondary colors, that is, colors which made by mixing two or
more primary colors. Green, orange, and violet are examples of
secondary colors.
Pair 2

Exercise 1: Do you prefer to look at paintings in which the
artist
has taken a painterly approach, as in Rebecca Scott’s work
discussed in this chapter, or do you prefer the approach of
David Bailly, in which the brushwork is disguised?
Exercise 2: If you were to hang a still life painting in your
home,
would you want it to convey a message, or would you prefer to
enjoy it on a “formal” level, that is, from the standpoint of the
elements of art and principles of design?
Exercise 3: Explain how can there be continuity between the
messages of David Bailly’s and Rebecca Scott’s work, given
that
they were produced more than three and a half centuries apart?
Pair 3: Julie Green and Carel Fabritius
Julie Green
I. One morning in 1999 artist Julie Green came across a
description in a newspaper of the execution of an individual
imprisoned in the state of Oklahoma. As she read the menu of
the individual’s final meal, she found that she had a lot of
questions. Green considered the importance and personal role
of food in her life and in the life of her family, and she began
to seek out accounts of the final meals of others who had died
through capital punishment. She began a series, ”The Last
Supper,” in which she would eventually paint the final meals
of 1,000 people who have been executed in the United States.

Julie Green
Montana 16 February 1917. One apple.
2011
Cobalt blue glaze on found plate; kiln fired
(The artist at “Flown Blue,” a midcareer retrospective
exhibition at the
American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona, California.)
II. Believing that the subject of a work of art should match
the medium, Green tried embroidering the last meals of
executed people onto napkins. However, she found that
technique to be prohibitively time consuming. She decided
instead to paint the final meals on ceramic plates she had
collected.
The art historical term for each plate used by Julie Green in
this series is found object. A found object is not made by the
artist but chosen by the artist to be included in a work of art. In
Green’s painting shown on the previous slide, Montana 16

February 1917. One apple., the found object is a white plate
with faint blue decoration on one side.
Green’s “The Last Supper” series has been widely
exhibited. The American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona,
California, organized a midcareer retrospective exhibition of
her work in 2019. A retrospective is an exhibition which looks
back at the scope of an artist’s career.
By the time Julie Green’s work was shown in Pomona, she
had completed more than eight hundred plates in “The Last
Supper” series. You can examine each plate in the series on the
artist’s website, which she organized by the states in which the
individuals were executed.
Carel Fabritius
I. The apple painted by Julie Green to memorialize an
individual executed in Montana in 1917 is highly detailed,
from the bright highlight to the shape of the stem. But
because she chose to paint all the meals in a single hue—
blue—the representation of the food takes on an otherworldly
quality.
By contrast, seventeenth-century Dutch artist Carel
Fabritius desired to depict objects so realistically as to fool
the eye. For The Goldfinch, Fabritius chose subtle browns and
creams as well as varying shades of grey for the purpose of
drawing as close to the colors of nature as possible. We refer
to Fabritius’s attempt to fool us into believing that this is not a
painting but an actual goldfinch as trompe l’oeil, a French
term which may be translated as “deceives the eye.”

Carel Fabritius
The Goldfinch
1654
Oil on wood
(detail)
II. In Fabritius’s The Goldfinch it is not through detail but
through color that the artist attempted to fool the eye. He
painted this subject on an unusually thick wooden support
which may have served as part of the construction of a
window in his studio. His deep understanding of the ways
natural light affects the surface of different objects enhanced
Fabritius’s ability to create a lifelike representation of the
bird.
The goldfinch is chained to a perch. Is this a
representation of someone’s pet? If so, is it portrait? Or should
the daily life of a songbird be categorized as a genre scene?
Because the artist paints the bird as an inanimate object
many scholars believe it is best discussed as as a still life.
Perhaps we should determine that this is a hybrid subject: a
work of art which may be categorized as more than one
subject type.

Pair 3
Exercise 1: Capital punishment, captivity . . . the themes
addressed by these works carry immense emotional weight.
What choices have the artists made—in purely visual terms—
to enable viewers to spend time contemplating these difficult
themes?
Exercise 2: In both cases these works have a relatively “flat”
background with little to distract the eye beyond the primary
subject. Why are the backgrounds chosen by the artists
suitable for these subjects?
Exercise 3: Julie Green created a sense of volume in her
representation of an apple through bright white highlights on
the apple itself. How did Carel Fabritius create a sense sense of
volume in his representation of the goldfinch?
Pair 4: Gehry, Oldenburg, and Van Bruggen
and Nils-Udo
Frank Gehry, Claes Oldenburg, and Coosje van Bruggen
I. An artistic collaboration signifies a temporary or long-
term partnership between two or more creative people who
share vision and labor to produce a work of art or architecture.
A successful collaboration is one in which we cannot imagine

the finished work without the contributions of each
participant.
The Chiat/Day Building in Venice, California, is an
example of a successful collaboration between architect Frank
Gehry and the sculpture team Claes Oldenburg and Coosje
van Bruggen.
(detail)
Frank Gehry (architect)
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (sculptors)
Chiat/Day Building (Binoculars Building)
Venice, California
1991
Steel, concrete, and painted cement plaster
II. This project, commissioned by the Chiat/Day advertising
agency, enabled experimental architect Frank Gehry to design a
building which evoked the history of still life representation.
Giant Binoculars, a work of sculpture designed by the artistic
team Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, serves as the
building’s doorway.
Long committed to producing monumental sculpture of

mundane objects, Oldenburg had been active in the Pop Art
movement of the late 1950s, during which artists prioritized the
representation of objects associated with ordinary life. Produced
more than thirty years after the height of Pop Art in the United
States, the design of the Chiat/Day Building acknowledges not
only the creative projects of the advertisers who worked inside
it,
but the history of art itself.
Nils-Udo
I. German artist Nils-Udo is committed to making art
that is transitory, that is, temporary and likely to disappear
over time. For this reason he chooses elements of nature
such as plants and sticks to construct works of sculpture. He
expects La Couvée (The Brood), which is sculpted in
marble, to wear away over time.
Nils-Udo
La Couvée (The Brood)
Fondation Carmignac, Hyères, France
2018
Carrara marble, earth, forest
II. In the 1960s, while Pop artists like Claes Oldenburg

were redefining the relationship between art and consumer
culture in urban environments, Nils-Udo turned to the rural
environment and began using plants as his primary medium.
He wrote, “Potential Utopias are under every stone, on every
leaf, and behind every tree, in the clouds and in the wind. . . .”
A utopia is a place where everything is ideal, or perfect.
Nils-Udo’s use of the term “utopia” may offer an important
key to understanding his motivation to produce a work such as
La Couvée (The Brood). It suggests that perfection is not
something artists make but which artists can discover if they
make art in conjunction with nature. By association, viewers
too can discover perfection if they search for it in the natural
environment in which the work is situated.
Pair 4
Exercise 1: If the Chiat/Day Building by Frank Gehry, Claes
Oldenburg, and Coosje van Bruggen offers a look back at the
history of art, in what ways does Nils-Udo’s La Couvée (The
Brood) offer a look forward?
Exercise 2: The Chiat/Day Building and La Couvée (The Brood)
both incorporate monumental sculpture. Why do you think
that some artists choose to work in an oversized scale?
Exercise 3: Do you think that each of these works are well
suited to their environments? Why or why not?

ARTS 1A
Topic 3
Topic 3
First, watch the following short video,
“Etre-là: Zanele Muholi”:
https://youtu.be/RTvNHtD_iH8
https://youtu.be/RTvNHtD_iH8
Pair 1: Zanele Muholi and Frida Kahlo
Zanele Muholi
I. For the series “Faces and Phases,” artist Zanele Muholi used
portraiture to document the presence of LGBTQ people in South
Africa, the first nation to acknowledge and include protection
for
this community in its constitution. Portraiture is a subject type
in
which the identity of the subject is the most important aspect of
the
work of art.
In spite of the constitutionally protected status of the LGBTQ
community in South Africa, widespread homophobia has led to
acts of violence upon many black lesbians and others who
identify
as LGBTQ. Zanele Muholi titled each portrait with the subject’s

name and the location where each was photographed. Each
portrait was meant to be a document of the existence of the
subject.
Zanele Muholi
Xana Nyilenda, Newtown, Johannesburg
From the “Faces and Phases” series
2011
Gelatin silver print
II. Zanele Muholi’s answer to the different forms of violence
enacted upon members of this community is to increase the
visibility of those who identify as LGBTQ in South Africa. In
the
portrait Xana Nyilenda, Newtown, Johannesburg, the artist
manipulated photographic equipment to create a sharp, highly
detailed portrait. The implied texture, that is, the illusion of
variation on the surface of the image, especially the details of
the
subject’s t-shirt and leather jacket, aids viewers in seeing Xana
Nyilenda as possessing a strong material presence and reality,
defying attack or erasure.
Frida Kahlo

I. Unlike Zanele Muholi, who uses portraiture to document the
lives of people, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted people and
objects “just as I saw them with my own eyes and nothing
more”.
Even so, in her Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair the artist
offered
direct access to her identity. For this self-portrait, which refers
to a
portrait of an artist created by the artist herself, Frida Kahlo
represented herself seated, looking directly at the viewer. The
details of surfaces are less important than the artist’s need for
the
viewer to notice and consider the range of objects included in
the
picture plane: a pair of scissors, hair strewn on the floor, a
bright
yellow chair, an oversized man’s suit, and musical notes and
lyrics
hovering above the artist.
Frida Kahlo
Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair
1940
Oil on canvas
II. Largely self-taught, Frida Kahlo is often labeled a Surrealist.
Surrealism refers to a historical period in the 1920s and 1930s

during which artists produced imagery stemming from their
subconscious or unconscious selves, including imagery from
dreams. Whether or not Frida Kahlo applied this label to her
work,
she exhibited her work with Surrealists. Viewers were not meant
to
see Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair as a document of a specific
event. Rather, the artist communicated her state of mind while
making this self-portrait. The song at the top of the picture
plane
offers a clue as to the tone this work was meant to achieve:
“Look,
if I loved you it was because of your hair. Now that you are
without hair, I don’t love you anymore.”
Pair 1
Exercise 1: Observing works by Zanele Muholi and Frida Kahlo
side by side, consider the use of clothing as an aspect of the
identity of each subject. How have you used clothing to convey
aspects of your own identity when posing for portraits?
Exercise 2: If you were to produce a self-portrait, what objects
or
props would you include in the picture plane?
Exercise 3: Both images are intended to communicate aspects of
violence. Zanele Muholi portrays Xana Nyilenda to face and
eventually overcome violence against the LGBT community in
South Africa. Frida Kahlo represented herself enacting violence
on

her own hair. Take a few minutes to find additional portraits or
self-portraits online. How typical is it for portraiture to contain
a
reference to violence?
Pair 2: Unidentified artists from Fayum and Ravenna
Unidentified artist from Fayum
I. Nearly for as long as people have been making art, people
have been making portraits. The ancient Egyptians found it
necessary to attach a portrait of a deceased person to her or his
mummy: the preserved body wrapped in cloths, because they
believed that an individual’s life force would go on living after
death, and regularly needed to reunite with the body. Hundreds
of
portraits still attached to mummies have been found buried at
the
Egyptian oasis of Fayum.
Unidentified artist from Fayum
Isidora
100-110
Encaustic on wood

II. The portrait of a woman named Isidora made by an
unidentified painter at Fayum was produced by means of a
painting technique called encaustic, in which soft wax is mixed
with pigment (ground minerals or plant matter) then brushed
onto
a wooden support. Such a technique was difficult to master but
permanent, since the sticky wax adhered well to wood. A skilled
artist using the encaustic technique could produce portrait
likenesses in great detail. Isidora’s golden headpiece, as well as
her earrings, indicate that she was an elite, like the others at
Fayum who were sufficiently wealthy to be mummified and
have
their portraits attached to their mummy.
Unidentified artist from Ravenna
I. A mosaic is made by embedding small pieces of stone or
glass in cement, on surfaces such as walls or floors, and was a
widely used technical process throughout the period of the
Roman Empire. Later, during the sixth century, when the
Emperor
Justinian and the Empress Theodora ruled over Byzantium, a
territory roughly equivalent with that which had been ruled by
the
ancient Romans, an unidentified artist designed a representation
of the empress to be constructed on the wall of San Vitale, a
church in Ravenna, Italy. In this mosaic, Theodora is depicted
as
participating in the Christian ceremony of the Eucharist (also
called “communion” or “mass”) which celebrates the death and
resurrection of Jesus. Robed in purple at the center of the
composition, she holds a ceremonial cup of wine.

Unidentified artist from Ravenna
Empress Theodora Participating in a Ceremony
San Vitale, Ravenna
c. 526-547
Mosaic
II. More than most technical processes of art making, a
mosaic has actual texture: physical surface variation. If a
mosaic
is constructed on the floor, the variation in the surface
diminishes
over time, since it is walked on, and eventually becomes worn
smooth. But the mosaic depicting the Empress Theodora
participating in a church ceremony was constructed on a wall at
San Vitale, and as such it has retained its textured surface. If
someone holding a candle were to stand near the mosaic, the
tiny pieces of colored stone or glass used to construct it would
reflect the candlelight unevenly, since the surface of this work
of
art is highly textured.
Pair 2

Exercise 1: Look closely at each image. What can you
determine
about the social status of Isidora from her portrait? Is she
wealthy?
Is she poor? What can you determine about the social status of
Theodora from her portrait?
Exercise 2: The artist who painted Isidora likely met his
subject.
What in the portrait itself suggests this? The artist who
designed the
mosaic of Theodora did not likely meet his subject. How does
the
portrait suggest this?
Exercise 3: If you were going to ask an artist to make a portrait
of
someone you care about, would you prefer that the artist work
with encaustic paint or produce a mosaic? Explain your choice.
Pair 3: Amy Sherald and Joshua Reynolds
Amy Sherald
I. In March of 2020, twenty-six year old Breonna Taylor was
killed
while sleeping in her bed in her apartment in Louisville,
Kentucky. She
was shot by law enforcement officers when they entered her
home
during a failed narcotics raid. The tragedy of Breonna Taylor’s
death
became a matter of intense public outrage. Artist Amy Sherald,

the first
African-American artist to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait
Competition at the National Portrait Gallery, was asked by a
guest
editor at the magazine Vanity Fair to produce a portrait of
Taylor.
The recipient of a heart transplant, Amy Sherald is immuno-
compromised. For this reason she had been unable to participate
in
Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020. In a
published
interview with Vanity Fair, Sherald referred to this portrait of
Taylor as
her way of contributing to the “moment and to activism—
producing
this portrait keeps Breonna alive forever.”
”I also made this portrait for her family,” said Sherald. “I mean,
of course I made it for Vanity Fair, but the whole time I was
thinking
about her family.” Sherald normally makes physical studies of
people whose portraits she constructs, but she did not have this
opportunity with Taylor, since this is a posthumous portrait,
that is,
a portrait made after the death of the subject. Instead, Sherald
talked to Taylor’s friends and family. She learned, for example,
that
Taylor’s boyfriend had been planning to propose marriage.
Taylor
wears an engagement ring in Sherald’s portrait.
Once the painting was finished, it was photographed and
printed by means of lithography as the magazine’s cover for the

September 2020 issue, six months after the death of Breonna
Taylor.
But what would happen to Sherald’s original painting?
Amy Sherald
Breonna Taylor
2020
Oil on linen
Like many professional artists today, Amy Sherald works with a
private gallery to sell her work to individuals or institutions.
(Most
galleries retain half of the sale of a work of art if they can
identify
a buyer for it.) But in the case of this portrait of Breonna
Taylor,
Sherald worked with nonprofit arts organizations to place the
painting at museums who have made a commitment to share it
with the public: the National Museum of African American
History
and Culture at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and The
Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Taylor’s home town. A
nonprofit
arts organization is a group who use their resources not to make
money but to further specific causes or goals. The nonprofit arts
organizations which helped Sherald find museums to share the
responsibility of keeping this work in the eye of the public are

the
Ford Foundation and the Hearthland Foundation.
Joshua Reynolds
I. Completed soon after becoming the first president of
Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts in London, Joshua Reynolds
painted The Archers not to sell but to exhibit at the annual
exhibition of the new academy. Exhibitions, that is, public
displays of works of art, were the primary ways that academic
artists like Reynolds attracted public attention to their work. A
portrait of two friends, this painting remained in Reynolds’s
studio
until the death of Colonel Acland, pictured on right. In 1779,
the
colonel’s widow, Lady Harriet Acland, purchased the painting
from Reynolds.
Joshua Reynolds
Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney:
The Archers
1769
Oil on canvas
II. In The Archers, Reynolds represents two friends, Lord

Sydney and Colonel Acland, as hunters within an extensive
landscape. To achieve this, he relies on a strong sense of
foreground and background. In the foreground, the part of the
landscape closest to the viewer, he places the friends in a thick
grove of trees, along with the animals they have killed during
the
hunt. Reynolds achieved the illusion of depth receding into the
landscape by opening up the trees to offer a glimpse of the land
in the background, the part of the landscape behind the subjects.
Angelica Kauffman arranged Cornelia, Mother of the Gracci
(recall chapter 2) with similar attention to foreground and
background. Recall that it was Joshua Reynolds who invited
Angelica Kauffman to become a founding member of the British
Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Pair 3
Exercise 1: In what ways did the makers of both portraits
succeed in representing real people, while at the same time
suggesting a sense of timelessness about them?
Exercise 2: The portrait by Joshua Reynolds includes a strong
presence of the natural environment. Why do we call it a
portrait rather than a landscape?
Exercise 3: Both portraits were painted in oil, a medium
which gives artists great potential for mixing the exact colors
they want to convey. With this in mind, describe each artist’s
approach to color.

Pair 4: Lina Bo Bardi and Thomas Jefferson
Lina Bo Bardi
I. Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi completed her university
training as an architect in 1939, opened a professional studio in
1942, and oversaw the realization of one of her designs for the
first time in 1950: The Glass House, built in the rain forest
outside
of São Paulo, Brazil. A proponent of rationalist architecture,
that
is, an approach to architectural design and construction which
values efficiency, visual simplicity, and practical function, Lina
Bo
Bardi also worked as an illustrator, journalist, and administrator
for prominent magazines such as Domus and Habitat. Prior to
moving to South America, she traveled throughout war-torn
Italy,
advocating for reconstruction.
Lina Bo Bardi
The Glass House
Morumbi, São Paulo, Brazil
1950-1951
Concrete and glass

II. Lina Bo Bardi’s efforts at raising public awareness for
postwar reconstruction in Italy eventually served as the basis
for a
prominent architectural career in Brazil, where she oversaw the
transformation of several existing buildings into museums, a
theatre, and a community center. For herself and her husband
she
designed The Glass House, a structure composed of concrete
slabs and glass walls set on a hillside. The architect raised the
house on pilotis: piers that elevate a building above the ground
or
water. The use of pilotis allowed the couple to live up amongst
the
trees. An intensely personal project, Lina Bo Bardi described
the
house as “an attempt to arrive at a communion between nature
and the natural order of things; I look to respect this natural
order,
with clarity, and never liked the closed house that turns away
from
the thunderstorm and the rain, fearful of all men.” She lived in
the
house for four decades.
Thomas Jefferson
I. Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House and the Virginia home that
Thomas Jefferson designed for himself and his family,
Monticello,
may be linked to the practice of self-portraiture, since both
projects emphasized the values of the architect residents.
Jefferson’s Monticello was informed by his engagement in the

Age
of Enlightenment: a seventeenth and eighteenth century cultural
movement which prioritized pursuits of reason, science, and
individual liberty. Jefferson had begun construction on his home
prior to relocating to France in the 1780s, where he served as
U.S.
ambassador. Upon being exposed to Neoclassicism (recall
chapter 2), wherein architectural design was inspired by ancient
Greek and Roman forms, Jefferson redesigned Monticello to
reflect the ideals of his Enlightenment education.
Thomas Jefferson
Monticello
Charlottesville, Virginia
begun 1792; redesigned 1796-1809
Brick
II. In the truest sense of the word, Thomas Jefferson was an
amateur architect. The word amateur has its roots in the Latin
verb
amare: to love. An amateur is one who engages in an activity
not
as a result of financial necessity but because she or he is
passionate about that activity. Often called “the architect of the
Declaration of Independence,” Jefferson approached the
practice
of architecture with a degree of seriousness similar to his

devotion
to political ideas. In addition to designing Monticello, he also
designed the campus of the University of Virginia, the Virginia
State Capitol, and his vacation home, Poplar Forest—structures
which are nationally protected and widely considered to be
among the most accomplished examples of architectural design
in
the United States in the nineteenth century.
Few people have the resources to practice architecture as an
amateur, but Jefferson inherited the land on which he built
Monticello as well as most of the slaves who provided the labor
to
build it.
Exercise 1: In what ways may Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House
and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello be linked to the subject
category of portraiture?
Exercise 2: Consider that both houses are located within
heavily forested areas. What are the similarities and
differences of The Glass House and Monticello? Are there
more similarities or differences between these structures?
Exercise 3: Which house would you rather live in: The Glass
House or Monticello, and why?
Pair 4

ARTS 1A
Topic 4: Genre
“Frank Wong: Chinese Historical Society of America”: 5
:
https://youtu.be/TrkaGV2VH70
https://youtu.be/TrkaGV2VH70
Pair 1: Frank Wong and Mona Hatoum
Frank Wong
I. San Francisco artist Frank Wong has succeeded in
transforming his memories of Chinatown into physical form.
He makes miniature scenes of places he recalls from his
childhood, each in the form of a diorama: a model of a scene
with three-dimensional figures. For Dining Room, this former
Hollywood prop master constructed tiny chairs, lamps, plates,
and other objects associated with daily life to reconstruct a
highly detailed setting that corresponds with his memory of
this room.
Frank Wong

Dining Room
From the “Chinatown” series
Before 2004
Diorama
geII. Each of the dioramas in Frank Wong’s “Chinatown” series
is meant to evoke a scene of daily life rather than a specific
historical event. As such, they should not be categorized as
history subjects. While it might be tempting to categorize them
as landscapes (after all, they conveya strong sense of place),
the the environment is not the most important aspect of these
works. Rather, Frank Wong’s goal is to recall the day-to-day
experience of living in Chinatown when he was young. As
such, these should be categorized as genre subjects: scenes of
everyday activity. While the concept of what is “everyday” is
different from artist to artist, the genre subject category
includes representation of those types of activities considered
ordinary and normal for many: bathing, shopping, working,
sitting down for a meal, going to school, resting.
Mona Hatoum
I. In 2000, Palestinian-born artist Mona Hatoum assembled
a bed, chairs, desk, toys, kitchen utensils and other objects
often found in homes, to make an installation: an artist’s
construction of an environment for the purpose of immersing
observers in an experience. But viewers of this installation,
Homebound, may not enter the gallery space in which it is
located, since Mona Hatoum has directed that live electrical

wires connect the objects, rendering the installation
dangerous. Steel cables are stretched across the entrance to the
installation to prevent observers from touching the objects and
being electrocuted.
Mona Hatoum
Homebound
2000
Installation
II. When compared with Frank Wong’s Dining Room, Mona
Hatoum’s Homebound offers an alternative approach to what
constitutes “everyday living” for some people. Whereas Frank
Wong desires viewers to enjoy the nostalgia and comfort he
feels when he thinks about Chinatown’s past, Mona Hatoum
offers the opposite: a setting where objects associated with
daily living are fraught with conflict and violence.
Light is one of the elements of art, and both Frank Wong
and Mona Hatoum have brought artificial light into the
construction of these works of art. In Dining Room, three
miniature lamps emit artificial light: incandescent, fluorescent,
or neon light; in Mona Hatoum’s Homebound, large box
lamps at the center glow and then diminish as the sound of the
electrical current sweeps through the installation.

Pair 1
Exercise 1: Frank Wong relied on personal memories to
produce the diorama. While Mona Hatoum may or may not
have relied on personal memories to produce Homebound.
Still, why do genre subjects tend to provide the impression that
the artist is sharing a personal experience?
Exercise 2: Both artists seek to give observers of these works a
sense of “home”. Which, in your opinion, is a more powerful
look at the concept of home, and why?
Exercise 3: Both artists chose to implement artificial lighting as
a fundamental part of these works of art. Why do you think
each artist chose to include artificial lighting?
Pair 2: Carrie Mae Weems and Johannes Vermeer
Carrie Mae Weems
I. Carrie Mae Weems’s series, the “Kitchen Table,”
addresses domesticity, a theme sometimes explored by artists
who utilize the genre subject category. Whereas genre subjects
can include any aspect of everyday living, domesticity
specifically refers to the concept of home life or family life. In
the untitled photograph by Carrie Mae Weems included in this
chapter, a woman and a man embrace near a table, upon
which is placed a newspaper and what appears to be a glass of
water. The setting is pared down. Only a few objects and

pieces of furniture are included in the picture plane, requiring
observers to focus on the couple.
Carrie Mae Weems
Untitled
From the “Kitchen Table” series
1990
Gelatin silver print
II. One of the ways Carrie Mae Weems makes this
photograph visually powerful is through her understanding and
application of light value: the variation of light and dark in a
work of art. The artist offers a range of light values, from very
dark (the man’s shirt) to very light (note the artificial light
above the heads of the couple), to variations of gray between
the black and white, including a shadow on the rear wall
which graduates from light at the bottom of the picture plane
to dark at the top. By keeping the most extreme light values at
the center—the darkest dark and the whitest white—Carrie
Mae Weems keeps our attention where she wants it to be.
Johannes Vermeer
I. The seventeenth-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer
produced paintings best categorized as domestic genre scenes.

Working in an era before artificial light was invented, Vermeer
mastered the illusion of natural light: sunlight, moonlight, and
firelight, in the paintings he produced. In The Lacemaker,
sunlight falls upon the hands of the young woman,
illuminating each facet of her fingers with a different light
value. This leaves observers with an impression that there must
be a window outside the picture plane to the right, which
admits sunlight into the room. The wall at the back reveals a
slightly higher light value to the left, suggesting there is an
additional window outside of the picture plane, to the left.
Johannes Vermeer
The Lacemaker
c. 1669-1670
Oil on canvas
II. In addition to carefully incorporating the effects of
natural light to make forms look natural, Vermeer often used a
specific painting technique that allowed him to blend the
edges of forms, resulting in the illustion of softer forms. The
technique is: wet-on-wet, in which an oil painter places a
layer of paint on top of paint which is still wet, enabling the
layers to combine. You may remember that Vincent van Gogh
(recall Chapter 1) used this technique, partly out of necessity,
since he painted quickly. Vermeer did not paint quickly.
Vermeer used the wet-on-wet technique because of the effects
that were possible through use of this technique.

Pair 2
Exercise 1: These works of art reveal very little about the
location of the subjects, yet observers usually assume that the
subjects are at home. Do you? Why or why not?
Exercise 2: Imagine that you gave permission to a
photographer to follow you for an entire day as you do
ordinary things. Describe an image of you engaged in an
everyday activity that a photographer might capture. How is
your ”imagined” image similar to, or different from, genre
imagery by Carrie Mae Weems or Johannes Vermeer?
Exercise 3: Which artist—Carrie Mae Weems or Johannes
Vermeer—has produced a more convincing glimpse of
everyday life? Explain your answer.
Pair 3: Unidentified Greek and Roman artists
Unidentified Greek artist
I. Numerous works of marble sculpture dating from the
third millennium B.C. have been found on the Cyclades, Greek
islands in the Aegean Sea. These works are generally small and
usually depict women in a reclining position, that is, lying
down. Many appear to be pregnant. But some of the figures
depict men, including the Male Harp Player featured in this

chapter, a representation of a professional musician at work.
This work of art is an example of an approach to sculpture
called sculpture in the round, in which the object is
freestanding, not attached to anything. Set in a museum case,
you can walk around it and view it from any position.
Sculpture in the round
Bronze age
Unidentified artist
Male Harp Player
c. 2700-2300 B.C.
Marble
II. The Male Harp Player offers a glimpse of everyday life
within a community of Greek people who thrived during the
Bronze Age: a historical period which dated from the fourth to
the first millenia B.C., and which is characterized by the ability
of people to produce bronze objects from an alloy of copper
and tin. Bronze tools were likely used by ancient sculptors to
produce works such as the Male Harp Player. Bronze is a
harder and more durable substance than stone or other metals
available to sculptors during that era.
Unidentified Roman artist

I. In the ancient Mediterranean world, Classical antiquity
followed the Bronze Age, leading to the development of new
technologies for sculptors. Classical antiquity refers to the
ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, dating roughly from the
8th century B.C. through the 4th century A.D., and is
characterized by widespread development of language and
culture. Many of today’s social practices and beliefs are rooted
in political and religious ideas held by the Greeks and Romans
during Classical antiquity.
In Interior of the shop of a cloth merchant, a marble
sculpture produced during Classical antiquity, an unidentified
Roman sculptor has designed a genre subject—a representation
of people shopping—probably to be used as a shop sign on the
exterior of a building. Some figures are seated, as if observing
or
waiting, while others stand, holding or testing cloth items
featured in the store, including belts and pillows.
Unidentified artist
Interior of the shop of a cloth merchant
Before 300 A.D.
Marble

II. Unlike the Male Harp Player, this marble sculpture is an
example of an approach to sculpture called sculpture in relief,
where the figures emerge from a background of the same
material, and to which they remain a part.
Sculpture in the round and sculpture in relief are not
techniques in themselves; rather, they represent different
approaches to three-dimensional representation of subjects.
Once a sculptor determines that a work will be made in the
round or in relief, the sculptor can then choose tools and
materials to engage in a technical process to complete it.
Pair 3
Exercise 1: Unlike works by Carrie Mae Weems and Johannes
Vermeer, in which people were represented at home, these
works by ancient Greek and Roman artists were meant to
represent people working in public places. What indicates
this?
Exercise 2: What are the advantages of observing a work of art
sculpted in the round? What are the advantages of observing a
work of art sculpted in relief?
Exercise 3: Describe the specific actions of the figures in these
works. While genre subjects are scenes of everyday activities,
how active are the subjects in each of these works?

Pair 4: Gérôme and
Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative
Jean-Léon Gérôme
I. The French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme specialized in the
production of genre paintings based not on every-day reality but
on
every-day fantasy. For The Bath, he imagined a setting in which
an
enslaved woman with brown skin bathes a woman with pink
skin.
Everything in the picture plane, from the text on the tiles above
the
two women to the fountain, the bath shoes, the garments, and
the
jewelry, were designed by Gérôme to transport viewers to an
alternative reality. Gérôme participated in a mode of cultural
production which Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said
called
Orientalism: a widespread European tendency to stereotype
people
and places in “the East” as timeless, uncivilized, and exotic.
The world
depicted in The Bath did not exist but instead was based on
French
ideas about people who lived in places as diverse as Turkey,
Asia, and
northern Africa.
Jean-Léon Gérôme

The Bath
c. 1880-1885
Oil on canvas
II. Gérôme was a successful and popular painter in nineteenth-
century France. One reason for this was his approach to
technique:
he was a highly detailed painter who exercised careful control
of his
brush. The Bath reveals many such details, which continue to
affect
viewers’ perceptions of its forms, since the greater the detail,
the
more viewers are inclined find a painting believable. Another
aspect
of this artist’s work which resulted in his popularity was his
narrow
approach to concepts of female beauty. The seated woman in
The
Bath is an example of a body type that many heterosexual men
in
Paris in the 1880s found both beautiful and sexually appealing.
While Gérôme was a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts
(School of Fine Arts), more than two thousand students received
instruction from him in his atelier, or teaching workshop.
Through his
teaching, Gérôme had a significant influence on cultural
production
in France which extended well into the twentieth century.

I. The Jagonari Educational Resource Centre in London was
designed by Matrix, a feminist architecture cooperative formed
in
1980 to explore women’s issues in relation to built forms. A
cooperative is an organization that is owned and managed by its
members.
Members of London’s Bangladeshi community, and
Bangladeshi women, in particular, worked with Matrix to
achieve a
successful design for the center. They sought a design which
would
acknowledge architectural forms associated with their heritage,
yet
not call too much attention to their cultural differences, given
their
concerns about racism. Racism is one of the ramifications of the
stereotypes perpetuated by Orientalism.
All the women of South Asian descent who worked with
Matrix to design and construct the Jagonari Educational
Resource
Centre had been racially harassed while living in London, so
safety
was a primary concern. From the beginning of the project, it
was
determined that protective grilles would be placed over the
windows.
Members of Matrix designed grilles which evoked traditional
Islamic design but with an exaggerated geometry, allowing for a

modern look. The decorative grilles were fundamental to the
project’s success and are present in the original model.
Model of the Jagonari Educational Resource Centre
London
1984-1987
Brick with steel grilles
II. In addition to producing the Jagonari Educational Resource
Centre, the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative published a
book,
Making Space: Women and the Man Made Environment,
wherein,
among other things, they advanced the concept of domestic
work as
labor. Matrix is an outgrowth of the New Architecture
movement, a
British group which urged architects to take more seriously the
needs
of the actual users of buildings. When designing public
buildings,
architects have traditionally been concerned with pleasing those

who
paid them rather than the needs of a building’s users.
Pair 4
Exercise 1: Gérôme imagined a world beyond the borders of
France
for his patrons. In what ways did the Matrix Feminist Design
Co-
operative also exercise imagination in working directly with
people
of South Asian descent to produce a cultural center in London?
Exercise 2: Safety was a concern for Matrix and its patrons in
the
design of the Jagonari Educational Resource Centre. How did
Gérôme create the illusion of a safe environment for the woman
receiving a bath in his painting?
Exercise 3: The Jagonari Educational Resource Centre was a
public
building yet has grilles over its windows. What contrasti ng
elements
exist within The Bath by Gérôme?
ARTS 1A

Topic 2: History
Topic 2
“Service Episode: Ehren Tool Segment”:
https://youtu.be/A9Gpr7mjCnE
If you need the closed captioning feature, click the “CC” button
on
the bar at the bottom of the screen.
Pair 1: Ehren Tool and Pamphaios/Nikosthenes
Ehren Tool
I. Gulf War veteran and artist Ehren Tool makes cups to give
away rather than to sell. He considers making cups his vocation:
something he feels called to do as his life’s work. He supports
himself financially by working as a ceramics mechanician in the
Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, but when he is not
working as a lab tech he produces cups. Tool says that cups are
”the appropriate scale to talk about war and violence.” He
makes
them primarily as gifts for other veterans. “The cup,” Tool says,
“it’s
a little thing; it’s not confrontational. It’s just a cup.” The cup
made
by Ehren Tool included in this chapter features a representation
of
an AH-64A Apache Helicopter, which was used to fire the first

shots in Operation Desert Storm.
Ehren Tool
Cup
after 1991
Stoneware with glaze
II. Ehren Tool often depicts scenes of war on his cups, which
place them in the category of the history subject: representation
of historical events, religious figures, or scenes from literature.
In
the past, artists who represented history subjects often glorified
war, seeking to commemorate or memorialize acts of soldiers.
Ehren Tool does not believe in war memorials (“I think that
peace
is the only adequate war memorial,” he has stated), but in 2007
he made a video, “1.5 Second War Memorial,” in which he
depicted several of his cups being shot. He instructs viewers to
find out how many soldiers were killed in any particular war,
then
to multiply the number of casualties by 1.5 seconds, which is
the
time it takes to watch one of his cups being shot. If the viewer
selected World War II, she or he would have to watch “1.5
Second War Memorial” for almost two years.

Pamphaios (potter) and
The Nikosthenes Painter
I. Artists have been producing cups with imagery of soldiers for
thousands of years. Pamphaios and the Nikosthenes Painter, a
team of artists in ancient Greece, produced a kylix: a cup for
drinking wine, in which the underside reveals ten running
infantrymen bearing shields and carrying helmets. These
soldiers
possibly participated in a 400-meter race called the
“hoplitodromos” or “race of the soldiers,” a feature of the
Panathenaic Games, which were held in ancient Athens every
four years. The hoplitodromos was both a competition and a
military training exercise.
Pamphaios (potter)
and the Nikosthenes Painter
Kylix with Running Warriors
Late 6th century B.C.
Glazed terracotta
II. In ancient Greece, vase painters often used the red-figure
approach or the black-figure approach to glorify the acts of
soldiers on wheel thrown pottery: a technique of making vessels
in which clay is centered on a turning wheel while the potter
bends the clay between her or his fingers, stretching it upward.

In
black-figure ware, the figures are black and the background is
terracotta red. In red-figure ware, the opposite is the case: red
figures are depicted against a black background. The Kylix with
Running Warriors is an example of red-figure ware.
Pair 1
Exercise 1: Compare the image on Ehren Tool’s cup with the
underside of the ancient kylix. In what ways are these images
different from each other?
Exercise 2: While comparing these cups, consider the thousands
of years that separates their creation. How does the imagery on
the cups indicate that warfare has changed over the centuries?
How does the imagery on the cups indicate that warfare has
remained the same?
Exercise 3: Ehren Tool is responsible for throwing the cup and
producing imagery on it. The ancient Greek kylix is the creation
of
at least two people. Why might throwing vessels and designing
imagery have been distinct pursuits in the ancient world?
Pair 2: Poussin/Mellan and Polykleitos the Elder
Nicolas Poussin

I. Unlike Rembrandt, who both designed and prepared the
copper plates for his etchings, French artist Nicolas Poussin
produced designs for prints that were then turned over to
professional printmakers who prepared the plates. Poussin, who
specialized in history subjects—especially stories about ancient
Greeks and Romans and their gods—chose to live in Rome so he
could study ancient sculpture as well as imagery by artists who
were influenced by ancient art. In Poussin’s introductory
illustration for the book Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera (The Works
of
Horace), published in 1642, a female figure who embodies
inspiration bestows the ancient Roman writer Horatius with a
theatrical mask, signifying his achievement as a storyteller. The
winged child above their heads is about to crown Horatius with
laurel leaves, another mark of achievement.
This book illustration is not an etching but an engraving. Li ke
etching, engraving is a form of printmaking categorized as
intaglio
printmaking, in which grooves in a plate are filled with ink and
pressed into paper. In etching, the grooves are formed by acid.
In
engraving, the grooves are formed by the printmaker’s use of a
burin: a sharp v-shaped tool used to gouge metal. In the case of
Poussin’s Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera (The Works of Horace),
the
plate was engraved by Claude Mellan, a professional French
printmaker who copied an original drawing by Poussin to mass
produce this image. Mellan also produced original paintings but
he was widely known as a printmaker.

Nicolas Poussin; engraved by Claude Mellan
Frontispiece to the book Quinti Horatii
Flacci Opera (The Works of Horace)
1642
Engraving
II. Nicolas Poussin was an enthusiastic advocate for what he
called the grand manner: scenes of battles, heroic actions, and
the divine. In other words, Poussin was an enthusiast of history
subjects. However, not all history subjects contain battles,
heroic
actions, or divine things. Poussin’s design for Quinti Horatii
Flacci
Opera (The Works of Horace) has a grand manner theme
because
it includes representation of ”divine” figures: the winged child
and
the female personification of inspiration. If this engraving had
represented Horatius alone, it would still be categorized as a
history subject, but one without a grand manner theme.
Polykleitos the Younger
I. Just as buildings designed by Jørn Utzon and Kunlé Adeyemi
may be tied to the subject category of landscape (recall chapter
1),
other structures may be discussed in relation to the history
subject

category. This is the case with the ancient Greek theatre of
Epidaurus, designed in the 4th century B.C. by Polykleitos the
Younger. Since art historians define the history subject category
as
subjects associated with history, religion, and literature, we can
tie
museums (associated with history), buildings used for worship
(associated with religion), and theatres (associated with
literature)
to this subject category.
Polykleitos the Younger
Theatre
Epidaurus, Greece
4th century B.C.
Stone
II. The theatres designed by the ancient Greeks were conceived
in parts. The theatron was the seating area where the audience
sat
to view the performance; the circular orchestra was the area
used
as a stage; and the skene was an area behind the orchestra for
the
chorus and dancers. The skene opened up into a view of the
landscape beyond the theatre. The Greek word theatron stems
from a verb form which translates as “I view.” The word

theatron
has also been used to describe a place of military conflict, as in
“theatre of war”. Many Greek plays were tragedies involving
military conflict.
A contemporary photograph demonstrates the scale of an actor
in relation to the monumental size of the theatron in Epidaurus.
Scale is a principle of design that refers to the relative size of
an
object.
Pair 2
Exercise 1: Consider what it would have been like to watch a
play
performed in ancient Epidaurus. Which would have been the
better seats: those closest to the actors or those farthest away,
and
why? (Note: The accoustics are excellent at Epidaurus; those
who
sat in the highest seats could still hear the performance very
well.)
Exercise 2: Poussin’s design for the introductory illustration in
a
book containing writings by the ancient Roman writer Horatius
includes figures who appear to be ancient Romans. What did
Poussin need to consider when designing this image, to be able
to
convince viewers that this image represented people from

history
rather than his own day?
Exercise 3: What types of history subjects interest you?
Pair 3: Polykleitos the Elder and Pablo Picasso
Polykleitos the Elder
I. The designer of the theatre at Epidaurus, Polykleitos the
Younger, had a widely-respected teacher: his father, Polykleitos
the
Elder, who designed a famous sculpture, the Doryphoros.
Polykleitos the Elder used mathematical formulae to design the
body of the Doryphoros in an attempt to create a perfectly-
proportioned human figure. Proportion refers to the harmonious
relation of parts to each other, or to the whole. While most
consider the concept of a perfectly-proportioned human figure
to
be an outdated or even harmful idea, this project by Polykleitos
the Elder demonstrates that the ancient Greeks valued the
concept
of the “ideal”: that which they believed to be better than nature
itself.
Polykleitos the Elder
Doryphoros
Designed c. 440 B.C.;

Roman copy made second century B.C.
Marble
II. Polykleitos the Elder may have chosen to idealize the
Doryphoros, which translates as “spear bearer,” because this
sculpture honors a soldier. Not only did the sculptor attempt to
construct an ideal body to represent the soldier, he also
attempted
to make him appear somewhat lifelike by showing the figure in
a
relaxed posture called contrapposto, where the figure rests its
weight on one leg, with the opposite knee bent. It is important
to
note that this sculpture is an ancient Roman copy of a Greek
original sculpture by Polykleitos the Elder. This Roman copy is
damaged. Not only are parts of the body broken or lost, but the
surface of the marble has absorbed dirt. Today it looks
considerably different than it would have looked after it was
produced in an ancient Roman workshop.
Pablo Picasso
I. Most students who studied at European art academies from
the sixteenth century onwards were encouraged to admire
history
subjects produced by ancient Greek sculptors. As a child, the
Spanish artist Pablo Picasso studied art at the Escuela de Bellas
Artes in Barcelona, where became an expert in drawing works
of
ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. In a drawing featured in
this

chapter, Study of a Torso, Barcelona, Picasso demonstrated to
his
teachers that he understood how to represent light falling upon
an
object that has an uneven surface. The representation of
shadows
and highlights on an object which has an uneven surface is
called
chiaroscuro, based on the Italian words for light/dark.
Pablo Picasso
Study of a Torso, Barcelona
1895
Charcoal and black pencil on laid paper
II. In art school, students like Picasso typically spent several
years learning to draw in preparation for learning to paint. This
charcoal and black pencil drawing by Picasso was made on laid
paper: handmade paper which dried on screens, leaving the
surface somewhat rough. Specifically, Picasso was looking at a
copy of a work of sculpture by an ancient Greek artist, Phidias.
Like Polykleitos the Elder, Phidias produced sculpture in the
fifth
century B.C. The subject of Picasso’s drawing is a remnant of
architectural sculpture from the Parthenon, the largest temple on
the Acropolis, the hilltop which soars above Athens. The figure
itself is a representation of a river god.

Pair 3
Exercise 1: If art students like Pablo Picasso were taught to
draw
by copying ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, how might such
a practice affect their concept how to represent actual human
bodies?
Exercise 2: Carefully examine the Doryphoros. How does it
become clear to you that it is not a representation of a real
person, but is instead a form that has largely been invented by
the
artist?
Exercise 3: If Picasso and other students at art academies were
directed by their teachers to draw sculpture representing history
subjects, do you think it more likely that their work would
become focused on men or women?
Pair 4: Angelica Kauffman and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
Angelica Kauffman
I. Swiss-born artist Angelica Kauffman was not trained in an art
academy because women were were largely forbidden or
discouraged from attending art school in Europe until the
twentieth century. Taught by her father to draw and paint,

Angelica Kauffman nevertheless became and accomplished
professional artist. She was invited to be a founding member of
the British Royal Academy of Arts in London by Joshua
Reynolds,
its first president. This invitation was extended to Angelica
Kauffman because she was a specialist in paintings that featured
history subjects. As a teacher at the academy in London, she
coached students in the production of academic art: imagery
which retained the values of administrators of European art
academies.
Angelica Kauffman
Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi
c. 1785
Oil on canvas
II. The type of academic art in which Angelica Kauffman
excelled was called Neoclassicism: a revival of ancient Greek
and Roman ideas and forms. In Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi,
Angelica Kauffman placed at the center of this history painting
an
ancient Roman woman celebrated for her virtue. When a
neighbor shows Cornelia her jewels, Cornelia points to her
children, indicating that they, rather than jewelry, are her
treasures. Because her sons would grow up to be political
reformers in ancient Rome, Cornelia’s virtue was linked to the
idea of good government. As an artist working for a

government-
financed academy, Angelica Kauffman’s choices of history
subjects should be considered in light of eighteenth-century
European political ideas and practices.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
I. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi was a nineteenth-century Japanese
printmaker who specialized in ukiyo-e: Japanese woodblock
prints
which included a wide range of subjects, including history,
imagery of people in every-day life, and landscape. One of the
series of images designed by Yoshitoshi was “100 Aspects of
the
Moon,” which included the print Joganden Moon, an image best
categorized as a history subject. In this print, the 10th-century
courtier and poet Tsunemoto destroys with his bow and arrow a
deer he thought might attack Emperor Shujaku.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi
Joganden Moon
From the series “100 Aspects of the Moon”
c. 1885-1892
Woodblock print

II. Ukiyo-e is an example of relief printmaking, in which an
artist prepares a block or plate for printing by cutting away
from
the surface the areas not to be printed. In relief printing the
raised surface receives the ink, whereas in intaglio printing the
recessed areas receive the ink. In the production of multi -
colored
ukiyo-e prints, a separate block is carved for each color utilized
in
the design. As such, a single print could require more than a
dozen different blocks, depending upon how many colors of ink
are used.
Pair 4
Exercise 1: How effective were Angelica Kauffman and
Tsukioka
Yoshitoshi as storytellers?
Exercise 2: What were the different lessons that Angelica
Kauffman
and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi intended to teach with these images?
Exercise 3: Do all artists who produce imagery or architecture
tied
to the history subject category need to be able to tell a story or
teach a lesson? Why or why not?
* * *

26 A R C H I V E S O F A M E R I C A N A RT J O U R N A
L 5 5 : 1
NIKA ELDER
William
Harnett
Shows
His
Hand
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25, 2017 20:30:47 PM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and
Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
L 5 5 : 1
In 1890, The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace went on
display in the windows of Black, Starr & Frost, the oldest and
one of the most elite jewelry firms in New York City (figs. 1,
2). Both paintings—still lifes by American artist William
Harnett—portray objects that have been handled, used, and bear
the marks of age. The
Faithful Colt depicts a rusted .44-caliber Model 1860 Colt Army
Revolver hanging
against weathered wooden planks coeval with the surface of the
picture plane. Its
companion, Emblems of Peace, pictures an eclectic collection of

objects haphazardly
stacked upon a carved wooden table; the collection includes six
leather-bound books,
a musical score and newspaper, a ceramic jug and flute, a
candlestick and scissors, an
overturned meerschaum pipe, a box of tobacco, and matches.
These things—not to
mention the rustic and antiquated settings in which they were
depicted—would have
differed markedly from the opulent surroundings in which the
paintings were origi-
nally displayed. In the late nineteenth century, Black, Starr &
Frost sold everything
from fine clocks, watches, and leather goods to silver and gold
tea services, trophies,
and flatware. These elegant items were displayed in the firm’s
luxurious showrooms,
which moved up Broadway and, later, Fifth Avenue no fewer
than six times, following
the flow of consumer traffic.1
Despite the obvious differences between the objects displayed
in The Faithful Colt
and Emblems of Peace and the goods for sale at Black, Starr &
Frost, scholars have
characterized the artworks as trompe l’oeil deceptions that
sought to trick the viewer,
if only momentarily, into thinking their tableaux were
extensions of the settings in
which they were seen.2 Rendered with imperceptible brushwork,
the paintings have
been understood as an attempt to acclimate their original
viewers, who were also
consumers, to the deceptions of modern capitalism; they were
teaching these view-
ers to be more attentive to the illusionism of commodities,

which promise more than
they could ever deliver.
Harnett, however, would have seen the products for sale at
Black, Starr & Frost
as much more than commodities. From 1869 to 1875, the artist
worked as a silver
engraver at Wood & Hughes and, it is thought, Tiffany &
Company. These firms, along
with Black, Starr & Frost (which acquired Wood & Hughes in
1900) and Gorham
Manufacturing Company, constituted the most reputable silver
manufacturers in the
country.3 That Harnett worked in the silver industry is one of
the few facts we have
about his life. He left no letters, no journals, no personal or
professional correspon-
dence of any kind. In the absence of such documents, Harnett’s
work is well suited
to poststructuralist readings that consider his paintings in terms
of their reception.4
Although there are no written insights into the artist’s
motivations and interests, the
Archives of American Art holds a sketchbook of ornamental
designs Harnett made in
the early 1870s during his time as a silver engraver.
The drawings in the sketchbook look unlike anything scholars
have come to
expect from Harnett. There are neither tattered books, elegant
instruments, nor any
three-dimensional objects represented; there are only fifteen
pages of ornamental
designs likely destined for silver flatware. Though Harnett’s
drawings and paintings
differ dramatically in subject matter, the sketchbook offers

unexpected insights into
the technique he used to create his paintings and, by extension,
the cultural as well
as professional concerns that motivated his fine art. Using the
sketchbook as a key
primary source, this essay brings Harnett’s paintings into
conversation with his work
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Fig. 1
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Fig. 2
Fig. 1
William Michael
Harnett, The Faithful
Colt, 1890. Oil on

canvas, 22 ½ x 18 ½ in.
The Ella Gallup Sumner
and Mary Catlin
Sumner Collection
Fund, 1935.236.
The Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum
of Art, Hartford, CT.
Photograph by Allen
Phillips/Wadsworth
Atheneum.
Fig. 2
William Michael
Harnett, Emblems of
Peace, 1890. Oil on
canvas, 27 ½ x 33 ¾ in.
Michele and Donald
D’Amour Museum of
Fine Arts, Springfield,
MA. Gift of Charles
T. and Emilie Shean.
Photograph by David
Stansbury.
as a silver engraver to offer a new perspective on the
impeccable brushwork that has
come to characterize his art.
The years in which Harnett worked in the silver industry are
normally associated
with rapid industrialization.5 Bolstered by the discovery of new
silver reserves, silver
manufacturing increased exponentially, and ever more
machinery was introduced to
make the most of this supply. Ironically, however, the ability to

mass-produce silver
goods coincided with renewed emphasis on skill at every step in
the production pro-
cess—from designing to engraving, and from the training of
employees to the mar-
keting of finished products. Having worked in the industry,
then, Harnett would not
have seen the goods for sale at Black, Starr & Frost as
illusionistic commodities, but
rather as works of impeccable craftsmanship. The polished tea
sets and flatware were
the end result of a series of creative decisions and technical
maneuvers executed by
men of skill and training.
Harnett’s sketches offer insight into his seemingly routine, yet
decidedly imagina-
tive, role in this process. Further, they suggest that, like the
ornaments he inscribed
on silverware, trompe l’oeil was also a matter of technique.
Rather than a pictorial
style and a mode of deception, it was a mode of production that
asserted Harnett’s
manual skill and, by extension, defined his paintings over and
against the scourge
of mechanically reproduced images in late nineteenth-century
America. Trained in
the silver industry and the nation’s premier art academies,
Harnett did not approach
painting as a tool to adapt the public to a rapidly industrializing
consumer culture so
much as a craft that needed to be upheld and preserved in the
face of it.
25, 2017 20:30:47 PM

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Harnett began his career as an engraver in 1865. First he
worked on steel, copper, and wood, and eventually graduated to
silver.6 As an engraver in the jewelry business, Harnett would
have inscribed monograms and other designs onto silver
flatware and other custom objects—work that fine art-
ists of the period, such as Asher B. Durand, considered rather
tedious and monoto-
nous.7 These basic facts about Harnett’s career make the
sketchbook in the Archives
all the more surprising. In the eighteenth century, a craftsman
like Paul Revere
would have executed or overseen everything from the design to
the inscription of the
objects he was commissioned to make, so we might expect him
to have sketched out
all of these details.8 But by the 1870s, when companies like
Gorham divided this labor
into no fewer than twelve trades, it seems remarkable that a
silver engraver, in what
appears to have been a rather low-level position, would have
kept a sketchbook, let
alone one so whimsical and experimental as Harnett’s.9 Perhaps
further scholarship
on the silver industry and the early professional lives of artists
will prove that it was
common for engravers of flatware and other decorative objects
to make such studies.
Whether or not it is an anomaly in the industry, Harnett’s

sketchbook offers welcome
insight into his training, manual skill, and the cultural
imperatives behind them.
In the sketchbook’s fifteen pages, Harnett is given to incredible
flights of fancy.10
Only in rare instances, such as pages 4, 7, and 12, does he adopt
a methodical
and relatively systematic approach, dividing the sheets into
sections, each contain-
ing its own discrete motif or set of designs. Otherwise and
elsewhere, his approach
is more haphazard. Pages 1, 9, 19, and 28, for example, are
covered with a flurry
of designs, whereas the frontispiece (cover verso) and pages 5,
13–18, 21, and 25
bear only a few unrelated motifs. Two large designs anchor
page 3, but the rest of
the sheet is filled with all manner of motifs, many of which bear
no obvious formal
relationship to one another (fig. 3). Although the designs that
extend across
the top of the page are clearly variations on a theme, below
them lighter, more
whimsical motifs introduce wispy lines and decorative dots
unrelated to the row
of designs above. Only the semicircle at the bottom of the page,
with its crisp and
even line, appears to have been executed with the aid of a
compass or a similar
tool for ensuring precision. Otherwise, the lines are sketchy and
imprecise; they
double back on themselves and are asymmetrical, loose doodles
rather than firm
plans. While free line work and eclectic imagery are typical of
artists’ sketchbooks

and journals, these features would have been highly unusual for
an engraver,
who was expected to do little more than inscribe initials and
standard designs
on the ends of flatware. Harnett’s sketchbook, however, reveals
the imagination
intrinsic to the trade as it was practiced among the most elite
firms in the late
nineteenth century. As a result, it revises modern perceptions of
engraving as
a professional practice, our understanding of drawing as an
artistic medium, and,
ultimately, Harnett’s interest in trompe l’oeil.
The sketchbook represents one of two approaches to drawing
that Harnett prac-
ticed in his early adult years. While he worked as a silver
engraver, Harnett also took
classes at three prestigious art academies: the National
Academy of Design (NAD),
the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and
the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).11 Institutions like Wood &
Hughes and PAFA
employed drawing in radically different ways, and these
differences reveal the impor-
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tance Harnett would have ascribed to sketching and to the
principles and values he
picked up through his relation to the silver industry.
Two of Harnett’s figurative academic studies survive: a drawing
of the Venus
de Milo and another of the Borghese Warrior (fig. 4). In both
works, the eponymous
sculptures are rendered in charcoal on oversized paper as
Harnett seeks to work
out, with mixed success, human anatomy, foreshortening, and
translating the body
from three dimensions to two. The drawings’ fidelity (desired or
actual) to their
models enables us to understand the freedom and creativity that
Harnett found
and embraced in designing and engraving ornaments. Harnett is
known to have
taken antique classes at PAFA and life classes at NAD.12 In
both schools, he became
acquainted with the cornerstone of academic painting at the
time, the human fig-
ure—first, in the form of casts of classical statuary and, later, at
a more advanced
level, through work with live models. But rather than learn to
paint this subject, he
and his classmates were taught to draw it.13 Through careful
observation and meticu-
lous draftsmanship, they learned to copy. Drawing was not the
time to invent, inno-
vate, and imagine, but to imitate, replicate, and reproduce. It
was the first step in
the production of a significant work of fine art, but it was also
the most routine and
mechanical part of the process. Like the casts on which they

were based, academic
drawings of the Borghese Warrior and Venus de Milo were
reproductions, simply in
two dimensions instead of three.
Rather than copying and transcribing, designers and engravers
in the silver
industry used drawing to devise new and original motifs and
silhouettes. This is not
to say they came up with them out of thin air. Their work was
based on models, but
the goal was not to copy these models so much as to reimagine
and reinvent them.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
William Michael
Harnett sketchbook,
1870, 3. Graphite on
paper, 5 ½ x 7 ¼ in.
William Harnett
Sketches, Archives
of American Art,
Smithsonian
Institution.
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Fig. 4
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Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 4
William Michael
Harnett, Borghese
Warrior, 1873. Charcoal
and white chalk on pink
(toned) laid paper,
39 ½ x 34 in. Courtesy
of the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine
Arts, Philadelphia.
Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
David J. Grossman,
acc. no. 1960.16.
Fig. 5
William Michael
Harnett sketchbook,
1870, 20. Graphite
on paper, 5 ½ x 7 ¼ in.

William Harnett
Sketches, Archives
of American Art,
Smithsonian
Institution.
Fig. 6
Owen Jones, The
Grammar of Ornament,
plate XIX, Greek No. 5
(detail). (London: Day
and Son, 1856).
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L 5 5 : 1
Fig. 7
The ornaments in Harnett’s sketchbook engage such an inherited
vocabulary of
motifs. On pages 2, 4, 20, 27, and 28, for example, there are
lotus blossoms and pal-
mettes that one might find on ancient Greek and Etruscan vases
(figs. 5, 6). The design
on the frontispiece is comprised of the kinds of interwoven lines
that characterize
Celtic carvings. The chandelier-like designs on pages 6, 7, 11,
19, and elsewhere in the
sketchbook are, next to the lotus blossoms and palmettes, its

most common forms,
and resonate with the cascading vines in Italian Renaissance
decoration (fig. 7).
These historical motifs and others filled books like The
Grammar of Ornament
(fig. 8), a compendium of designs spanning the entire globe and
human history,
which the British architect and designer Owen Jones published
in 1856. Jones wanted
to encourage designers to return to nature and reinterpret it for
the modern age.
Indeed, his goal was to
aid in arresting that unfortunate tendency of our time to be
content with
copying, whilst the fashion lasts, the forms peculiar to any
bygone age,
without attempting to ascertain, generally completely ignoring,
the pecu-
liar circumstances which rendered an ornament beautiful,
because it was
appropriate, and which as expressive of other wants, when thus
trans-
planted, as entirely fails.14
Jones, however, was unsuccessful in this endeavor, as The
Grammar of Ornament
became one of the definitive sourcebooks for designers in the
United States.15 In fact,
Tiffany & Company and Gorham built libraries and collections
on site precisely to
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L 5 5 : 1
Fig. 8
provide their employees with reference materials such as
Jones’s book. As curator
Charles Venable notes, “The collections of natural specimens,
art reproductions, and
books noted in these passages [of articles on the design firms]
were, along with the
talent of the designers, the life blood of each firm’s design
room. Consequently, these
collections were often extensive.”16 Describing his visit to the
Tiffany studio on Prince
Street in New York in 1887, one visitor went as far as to
compare it to the American
Museum of Natural History, since it was full of “well-preserved
counterfeits of birds
and smaller animals, as also gourds, ears of corn, grasses &c.,
all of which have
Fig. 7
William Michael
Harnett sketchbook,
1870, 19. Graphite on
paper, 5 ½ x 7 ¼ in.
William Harnett
Sketches, Archives
of American Art,
Smithsonian
Institution.

Fig. 8
Owen Jones, The
Grammar of Ornament,
plate LXXVI,
Renaissance No. 3
(London: Day and
Son, 1856).
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L 5 5 : 1
already served or still serve, as studies.” “Running back the
entire length of the long,
light room are drawing-boards, at which sit busy designers,” he
went on to observe,
“while about them hang plaster casts, models and electrotypes
of designs which have
graced work previously done.”17 These resources were a
designer’s and, it appears,
engraver’s first recourse in developing new work: these
individuals researched extant
objects, models, and motifs, revising them into novel
configurations.
The designs in Harnett’s sketchbook make visible this process
of interpreta-
tion, translation, and transforma tion. Take, for example, the row

of seven motifs
that extend across the top of page 3 (see fig. 3). The first
iteration looks like a stylized
Venetian mask. One unbroken line creates a pointy “nose” and
bends back upon itself
to create two square “eyes,” each of which graces a “flap” on
either side of the “nose.”
In the next iteration, the line is broken, and the “eyes” are
removed. The third version
is almost the inverse of the other two; the negative spaces have
been shaded with thin
horizontal lines. The fourth marks a radical departure that
combines elements of all
the previous versions, such as the shading from iteration three
and the broken line
from version two. In the fifth version, Harnett retains the three
closed shapes that
emerged in the fourth and underscores two of them with doubled
lines. The sixth
and seventh iterations take another drastic turn, as the doubled
line introduced in
version five becomes the governing element and shape, and
results in a semicircular
form punctuated by a central column containing a stylized floral
design. The fact that
the first motif in the series appears fully formed and resolved
suggests that Harnett
likely imported it from somewhere else, but the source is
unknown.
The important thing to note is not the reference point for this
motif, which we may
yet discover in a late nineteenth-century design catalogue, but
what Harnett does
with it. Each successive motif responds to and expands upon
elements developed

within previous iterations. Although the process, as described
here, sounds relatively
methodical and systematic, the varied size, spacing, and hand of
the sketches suggest
it was incredibly intuitive and creative. Harnett appears to
embark on these formal
experiments without any recognizable goal other than
dismantling and reconstruct-
ing the visual vocabulary he would have inherited from the
eclectic collections and
vast libraries maintained by the firms where he worked.
The sketchbook does not contain any records of the objects on
which Harnett
worked, any written testimonials to his area of specialization, or
any insights into his
entrée into the silver industry. While we cannot say for sure
where Harnett’s designs
ended up, they were likely destined for custom-made flatware
and other silver goods.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the manufacture of
silver goods was, in
large part, mechanized, but specialty items—from utensils to
trophies to tea sets—
continued to be made by hand.18 Unlike mass-produced objects,
such items provided
ample opportunities and demand for formal as well as technical
experimentation.
Engravers could (and, in fact, had to) take liberties with their
sketches in order to
adapt them to a range of items, while designers had to draw
fully integrated objects
that machines would be able to (re)produce.
The sketchbooks kept by Edward C. Moore, a designer,
manager, and ultimately

artistic director of Tiffany & Company during this time,
exemplify the possibilities for
and restrictions on such work.19 A prototypical page bears
designs for three spoons,
each with a different silhouette that dictates the parameters and
the geometry of the
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Fig. 11
Fig. 10
Fig. 9
ornamentation upon it (fig. 9). The motifs reinforce and
underscore elegant aspects of
the silhouettes, but they are also fully embedded within them.
By contrast, Harnett’s
motifs float freely on the page, divorced from particular objects.
They would have to
be adapted, and adaptable, to different types of utensils and
perhaps other kinds of
things altogether.
Although none of the silverware that Wood & Hughes or
Tiffany & Company
produced in the early 1870s has been specifically linked to

Harnett, a napkin ring
that the artist made for the family of his friend William Ignatius
Blemly, a colleague
from Wood & Hughes, survives in the Blemly family collection
and offers a sense of
what Harnett’s finished work might have looked like (fig. 10).
The initials “MJB” are
inscribed in cursive script in the center of the ring and
surrounded by an ornate
geometric pattern similar to one on page 3 of Harnett’s
sketchbook (fig. 11). Although
we cannot definitively link the sketch to the napkin ring, they
are both comprised
of two interlocking open bands that conclude in swirls—yet
with some important
differences between them. The sketch is much simpler and
comprised strictly of full,
straight lines, whereas the engraving is far more florid: one of
the two lines in each
band is serrated rather than straight; additional curlicues spin
out of the concluding
spirals; there is shading within the large spirals as well as the
triangles at the top and
bottom of the motif; and, of course, there is the monogram
itself, at the center of it all.
These differences, however, seem related to and indicative of
the process of translat-
Fig. 9
E. C. Moore,
Sketchbook—Flatware
Designs. MS. Catalogue
#311. © Tiffany & Co.
Archives 2016.
Fig. 10

William Michael
Harnett, napkin ring,
ca. 1869–1875. Silver,
approx. 1 ½ x 2 in.
Inscribed: MJB. Blemly
Family Collection.
Image courtesy of
Loranne Carey Block.
Fig. 11
William Michael
Harnett sketchbook,
1870, 3 (detail).
Graphite on paper,
5 ½ x 7 ¼ in. William
Harnett Sketches,
Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian
Institution.
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L 5 5 : 1
ing a sketch on paper to an ornament in silver. Harnett takes the
opportunity to vary
the lines, forms, and shapes overall from sketch to finished
product.
But the final product—the engraving on the napkin ring—does

not betray any of
this work. It reads as a relatively generic design, easily and
perhaps mechanically
reproduced. The lines are firm, deliberate, and precise—if not
altogether even and
perfectly symmetrical. Harnett’s sketchbook, however, reveals
the story behind such
relatively pristine images. It allows us see the creative work
that went into them and
thus understand what engraving meant to Harnett and to those
who produced and
consumed silver goods at the end of the nineteenth century. It
was not a mechani-
cal and routine endeavor, solely dependent upon technical skill,
but an imaginative
process that invested commercial objects with personal value.
This value certainly
inhered in any initials that might be inscribed upon the objects,
but it also emerged
from the extended process of devising engravings of all kinds.
Harnett appropriated
a vocabulary of letters and images from extant sources,
sketched and transformed
them into new configurations or original combinations, and then
adapted and trans-
posed these designs into lines on silver. It was a creative
process that would have
differed dramatically from the kind of work he was doing at
NAD and PAFA. Rather
than reproducing extant models, he reimagined them in ways
that lent commercial
objects a personal touch, literally and figuratively.
The silverware on which Harnett worked was largely made by
hand and benefited
from the concerted attention of a number of trained craftsmen

and technicians. As
Harnett embarked on his career as a professional painter, he
would abandon the flo-
ral and geometric imagery that characterizes his sketches, but
retain the silver indus-
try’s investment in manual technique and technical skill. These
concerns would
become the substance of his work, manifest in the imperceptible
handiwork that his
paintings shared with his earlier engravings.
In his obituary for Harnett, the artist’s friend E. Taylor Snow
suggests that mecha-nization forced Harnett out of the silver
industry and into painting full time. Electroplating, a cheaper
alternative to objects made entirely out of silver, obvi-ated the
need for skilled engravers and, Snow claims, cost Harnett his
job.20 Given
that specialty objects continued to be made even as technologies
of mass produc-
tion were introduced into the trade, Snow’s claims are dubious;
nonetheless, they do
point to the explicit contest between mechanical production and
manual skill that
compelled the work that the silver industry required of Harnett
and, as I will claim,
motivated his approach to painting.
Through extensive training in both engraving and drawing,
Harnett spent his
early adult years cultivating his manual and technical skills to
create unique, hand-
made objects, be they paintings or flatware. Ironically,
however, art historians
have frequently compared his paintings to photographs because
of their seemingly
mechanical style. Douglas Nickel, for instance, has claimed that

Harnett’s “imper-
ceptible brushwork and seemingly equal regard for every detail
and surface made his
works appear more the creation of a machine than the human
hand.”21 David Lubin
has further noted that the paintings “look as though they have
never been touched
by painter or owner. They look instead as though they were
made by an intricate,
inordinately sophisticated, superphotographic machine.”22
While, for the most part,
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Harnett’s brushwork is imperceptible, his work and training in
the silver industry
should encourage us to think about the physical and intellectual
work required to
achieve this ostensibly effortless effect.
Recently scholars have explored how Harnett’s paintings and,
more specifically,
their “machine aesthetic” may have met the sociological needs
of a rapidly expand-
ing consumer economy.23 In his discussion of the discourse of
deception around
Harnett’s work, for example, Michael Leja asserts that
nineteenth-century accounts

of the paintings fooling Americans were exaggerations that
testify to the haptic
and psychological desires the works stirred and, therefore, to
the participation of
Harnett’s paintings in cultural anxieties around commodity
desire.24 But my analysis
of Harnett’s sketchbook suggests that, as an engraver and
academically trained art-
ist, Harnett would have been less concerned with the fetishism
of commodities than
with mechanical reproduction’s impact on manual labor,
technical skill, and thus the
cultural value of the kinds of art and craft in which he had spent
more than a decade
(1865–1877) becoming well versed. In a rapidly changing
commercial as well as visual
and material landscape, his imperceptible brushwork should not
be understood
exclusively as a means to deceive the viewer, but also as a way
to invest his paintings
with the technical skill and personal touch attributed to hand
engraving. Harnett
envisioned his paintings as handcrafted objects whose
emphatically material quality
was meant to distinguish them from, rather than imitate, the
mechanical character of
photography. The paintings, of course, might take on other lives
and meanings once
they entered the commercial marketplace, but to recognize
Harnett’s motivations
is to consider the paintings on their own terms and thereby to
understand the picto-
rial and cultural imperatives behind them, in addition to the
social functions they
may have served.

Conservation reports on Harnett’s paintings reveal how he
achieved the immacu-
late surfaces that characterize his work and provide insight into
his technique. First,
he applied a thick ground in vertical strokes, which would
obscure the natural weave
of the canvas and evoke the grain of the wooden paneling that
would be painted
on top of it. Next, he would score the ground, likely with the
back of a paintbrush, to
create the cracks and splits that appeared to mar the wood. He
then painted each
object individually into the composition; if there was any
overlap among the objects
(such as the gun and newspaper clipping displayed against the
wooden planks in
The Faithful Colt), they were depicted in successive layers.25 It
was an incredibly labo-
rious and, one imagines, tedious process that was the source of
much speculation
among critics.
Although scholarship has focused on the admittedly apocryphal
anecdotes about
people trying to touch, pick, scratch, or otherwise test the
veracity of the artist’s
hyper-realistic paintings, much of the period criticism on
Harnett’s work marvels at
the time and effort he must have taken to produce it. For
example, an unnamed critic
for the Springfield Daily Republican claimed that Harnett spent
seven months on
Ease and asserted that “in every detail of the great variety of
textures thus presented
to the artist for his skill to reproduce, he has been sufficient to
the task.”26 Likewise,

upon seeing The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace on view at
Black, Starr & Frost,
critic Frank Linstow White wrote that “both paintings are
executed with the pains-
taking care so characteristic of Harnett. The ivory pistol and
flute, discolored and
25, 2017 20:30:47 PM
L 5 5 : 1
cracked with age, the well-browned meerschaum, the gray
stone-ware of the jug, the
tobacco curling out over the edge of the paper-box—everything
is delineated with
truth in the minutest detail.”27 Whether, like White and the
Springfield reviewer, crit-
ics commended Harnett’s attention to detail or they belittled
him for it, professional
reviewers were significantly less interested in the potentially
deceptive aspects of
Harnett’s work than in the labor that went into it. Today, we
think of visible brush-
work as the mark of an artist’s hand, but in late nineteenth-
century America, the
opposite was true, too. It was the decided lack of visible
brushwork in his paintings
that revealed Harnett’s skill to both art insider and bourgeois
consumer.

Indeed, silver manufacturers expended much time, money, and
effort on both
cultivating and advertising the skill of the craftsmen who
produced their wares. In
addition to housing reference libraries and study collections,
firms like Tiffany &
Company hosted classes and courses that Charles Venable
suggests “went beyond the
standard apprenticeship system.”28 For example, he notes that
“to hone its trainees’
skills, Tiffany’s held competitions and offered cash awards to
those producing the
finest designs and examples of chasing, repoussé, raising, and
other technical
skills.”29 This training was announced in the finish and polish
of the objects them-
selves, but also in the marketing materials and display strategies
used to sell them.
The illustrations in a self-published history of Black, Starr &
Frost, where Harnett
showed The Faithful Colt and Emblems of Peace in 1890,
demonstrate how the
company advertised its employees’ experience and training;
these images can help
explain how and why Harnett was interested in announcing his
skill, too. One
illustration in the brochure depicts an early showroom at the
firm’s sixth location
(fig. 12). Framed paintings hang above the glass vitrines, which
are filled with all sorts
of silver wares. The manufactured products were thus aligned
with works of fine art,
as objects of comparable value as well as skill. Significantly, it
was in this era (the
1860s through the turn of the century) that silver manufacturers
started naming flat-

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