After the Hunt

This painting performs a kind of trickery. The artist uses oil paint on canvas to imitate a range of materials: a weathered wooden door, rusted metal hardware, worn leather, puffed duck feathers, and the gleaming metal of a horn. These are the trappings of a hunter, whose body is suggested by the placement of a hat at the top of the door and the way the gun, bag, and dead game hang—as if slung over his shoulder. William Michael Harnett mastered the genre of still life painting called trompe l’oeil—French for “fool the eye.” Trompe l’oeil pictures were popular in late nineteenth-century America, especially in saloons and bars, as visual entertainment for viewers who could delight in the paintings’ mechanics of imitation (even if not genuinely fooled by their two-dimensionality).