John Frederick Peto (1854-1907)
Still-Life with a Whale Oil Lamp, ca. 1899
Oil on canvasAbout the Artist:
The still-life painter John Frederick Peto was born in 1854 in Philadelphia. In 1878 he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he exhibited between 1879 and 1888. There he met and befriended William Michael Harnett, whose trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) still lifes exerted a
decisive influence on his career. Peto opened a studio in 1880 and earned a meager living by painting rack pictures for Philadelphia’s aesthetically unsophisticated business and professional men. He was reputed to have made photographic and painted portraits to support himself. An able cornetist, he began to perform for the Methodist Island Heights Camp
Meeting Association in New Jersey, where he built a house in 1889. Peto painted in semi-seclusion and obscurity there for the remainder of his life. He died in Island Heights in 1907.
Peto was almost completely forgotten until 1949, when he was “discovered” by art historians who were interested in and researching American still life painting.
About the Art:
Peto’s paintings tend to be anecdotal and sentimental in his choice of discarded and randomly placed objects. He painted a wide variety of still-life subjects, comprising of letter racks holding printed matter, shelves of books, tabletops and doors with hanging musical instruments. He may have intended this composition to suggest a theme of vanitas, which reminds us
of life’s fleeting qualities; it incorporates burnt-out matches, a dark lamp and damaged, discarded books.
