This recently discovered painting by William Harnett was, according to William Gerdts, “most likely painted in Munich during his first year abroad. The concern for exactitude in draftsmanship, the broad palette of bright but deep colors, and the array of objects, both costly, man-made vessels and the treatment of fruit are very typical of his work of 1881 especially.

“The fruit in the picture…conforms very closely to that in the series of fruit paintings he made in 1881—in the choice of fruit—primarily apples and grapes; in their coloration, and even in the ‘spotting’ of the apples (as distinct from either ‘perfection’ or ‘ageing’) while the partially peeled orange can be found in several other of Harnett’s still lifes containing fruit where it is combined with man-made containers. The variety of manmade objects—glass, metal, and textiles, as well as the shell, also suggest the artist’s ambition to prove his ability at verisimilitude of a variety of textures and surfaces, even heightening this achievement with the etching on the glass decanter, and the trompe l’oeil achievement of viewing some subjects—the fruit and wine—through glass, thus accomplishing a slightly diminished sense of clarity through glass and liquid.…The empathic weave pattern on the lower left textile is similar to that which appears in Harnett’s Frankfurter Zeitung painting [of] 1881, formerly in the IBM Gallery collection. Furthermore, the smooth surface of most of the painting conforms to Harnett’s work of the period, which began in Europe to emulate even further the exactitude and sense of finish he was able to study first-hand in the Dutch seventeenth-century still lifes on view in Munich. And while there are a few areas of impasto—on the open orange and on the shell at right—these are not inconsistent with some of Harnett’s later works done just previously in America where, for instance, there are small dabs of thicker paint still visible on matches and other objects.

“The tipping of the glass cup is unusual, but not inconsistent with Harnett’s attraction to the imminence of falling objects—book covers held by a single thread and the like. The most unusual aspect of the painting…is its size. Almost half a dozen pictures that Harnett painted in 1881 which combine fruit and objets d’art are known, but all are exceedingly small works. However, it stands to reason that Harnett, honing his skills at this degree of finish and exactitude, would then decide to attempt a major work on a large scale.”