Fool's Gold: American Trompe l'Oeil and the Gilded Age

This dissertation focuses on the many tabletop still lifes and trompe l'oeil paintings which were produced in the U.S. in the final three decades of the nineteenth century, as part of a broad cultural interest in verisimilitude. The dissertation argues that trompe l'oeil provoke a uniquely temporalized viewing process, whereby one way of perceiving the picture is always about to be exchanged for the other, making clearly evident and unavoidable the dual claims of realism to being both artful representation and objective truth. This argument about the structure of trompe l'oeil is set forth in the Introduction, where it is also argued that trompe l'oeil should be understood as a genre which both indexes and resists historical change. Chapter one looks closely at the tabletop still lifes made by William Harnett in the mid-1870s, exploring what has been called the "formulaic" aspects of these works and their meaning as "realist" paintings. Chapters two and three focus on the trompe l'oeil paintings of money produced by over a dozen artists. In these chapters the focus moves from a consideration of revealing anecdotes---such as Harnett's arrest for counterfeiting or the role of counterfeiting in the Revolutionary War, to the close consideration of the structural and historical dimensions of the trompe l'oeil representation of money. Here it is argued that both the strictly iconographic approach nor the formalist approach, which have together dominated the interpretation of these works, fail to take the duality of trompe l'oeil into account, thus neglecting to fully explore the relationship between the duality of trompe l'oeil and that of money itself. Chapter Four looks at a sampling of the many letter rack paintings made at this time argues that these "surrogate portraits" construct subjectivity as a collection of circulating effects collected up provisionally and determined socially. A central argument of the study is that the trompe l'oeil paintings produced at this time constitute an important expression of modernity, that trompe l'oeil and realism more generally need to be reconsidered within the history of modernism, and that their relevance for understanding twentieth-century art is yet to be fully grasped.