This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  John Peto was born on March 17, 1854 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the
son of a dealer in picture frames and later of fire department
supplies. Little is known of his early artistic training except
that he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1877 and
during the next half dozen years he contributed works to its annual
exhibitions. While as the Academy he was influenced by classmate
William Harnett, "trompe l'oeil" painter. In contrast to Harnett, he
painted commonplace subjects that were in disorder and ramschackled.
From
1879 to 1889 Peto tried to live the life of a professional artist by
maintaining a studio in Philadelphia. However he was not very
successful because he often painted objects that were perceived as ugly
and not the pleasing subjects the public wanted. He found he made more
money by playing the cornet.
In 1887 Peto traveled to
Cincinnati, Ohio, where he met and married Christine Pearl Smith.
It was also in the late 1880s that he began visiting the Methodist
resort community of Island Heights on the New Jersey coast near Toms
River. He and his wife built a house there, living an isolated
simple life. He supported his family by playing the cornet for
Methodist revival meetings and sold his paintings at the local drug
store to friends and local business people.
Peto was apparently
a well-liked member of his community and a doting father to his only
child, Helen, but his life was often turbulent and unhappy, due to
family squabbles, some law suits and ill health. Barely known
during his lifetime, he sank into almost total obscurity after his
death in 1907. Many of his works survived only because they were
mistaken for those of the much more famous William Harnett, and some
even wound up with Harnett's forged signature affixed to them.
Sources include:
John Ashbery in Newsweek magazine, March 14, 1983
Important Information Inside by John Wilmerding in Portfolio, November/December 1982
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher form Laguna Woods, California.
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Biography from Altermann Galleries and Auctioneers, V:
| John Frederick Peto (May 21, 1854 – November 23, 1907) was an American trompe l'oeil ("fool the eye") painter who was long forgotten until his paintings were rediscovered along with those of fellow trompe l'oeil artist William Harnett. Although Peto and the slightly older Harnett knew each other and painted similar subjects, their careers followed different paths. Peto was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the same time as Harnett.[1] Until he was in his mid-thirties, he submitted paintings regularly to the annual exhibitions at the Philadelphia Academy. In 1889, he moved to the resort town of Island Heights, New Jersey, where he worked in obscurity for the rest of his life. He and his wife took in seasonal boarders, he found work playing cornet at the town's camp revival meetings, and he supplemented his income by selling his paintings to tourists.[2] He never had a gallery exhibition in his lifetime.[3] Harnett, on the other hand, achieved success and had considerable influence on other artists painting in the trompe l'oeil genre, but even his paintings were given the snub by critics as mere novelty and trickery.
Both artists were masters of trompe l'oeil, a genre of still life that aims to deceive the viewer into mistaking painted objects for reality. Exploiting the fallibility of human perception, the trompe l'oeil painter depicts objects in accordance with a set of rules unique to the genre. For example, Peto and Harnett both represented the objects in their paintings at their actual size, and the objects rarely were cut off by the edge of the painting, as this would allow a visual cue to the viewer that the depiction was not real. But the main technical device was to arrange the subject matter in a shallow space, using the shadow of the objects to suggest depth without the eye seeing actual depth. Thus the term trompe l'oeil—"fool the eye." Both artists enthrall the viewer with a disturbing but pleasant sense of confusion.
Letter Rack by PetoPeto's paintings, generally considered less technically skilled than Harnett's,[4] are more abstract, use more unusual color, and often have a stronger emotional resonance. Peto's mature works have an opaque and powdery texture which is often compared to Chardin.[5]
The subject matter of Peto's paintings consisted of the most ordinary of things: pistols, horseshoes, bits of paper, keys, books, and the like. He frequently painted old time "letter racks," which were a kind of board that used ribbons tacked into a square that held notes, letters, pencils, and photographs. Many of Peto's paintings reinterpret themes Harnett had painted earlier,[6] but Peto's compositions are less formal and his objects are typically rustier, more worn, less expensive looking.[7]
Other artists who practiced trompe l'oeil in the late nineteenth century include John Haberle and Jefferson David Chalfant. Otis Kaye followed several decades later.
A pioneering study of Peto and Harnett is Alfred Frankenstein's After the Hunt, William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters 1870-1900. Frankenstein's book itself is a fantastic tale of solving the mystery of why these artists were forgotten for much of the twentieth century
Source: www.wikipedia.com |
Biography from South Coast Fine Art:
| John Frederick Peto was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1854. He was raised there and is listed in the 1876 Philadelphia directory as a painter residing on Chestnut Street (a favorite neighborhood of that city's artists). He was a musician as well as a painter and played the cornet in the Fire Department Band and at religious meetings. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, along with fellow student William Harnett, whose paintings were often confused with those of Peto due to their similarities in composition and subject matter.
Peto primarily painted still-life pictures as well as vertically oriented rack and door pictures and his paintings are notable for the realism of their worn and shabby objects. Because the articles depicted show wear and the effects of time, his paintings did not appeal to popular nineteenth-century taste, which valued more opulent imagery.
In June 1887, Peto married Christine Pearl Smith, and to earn money, he began to commute to Island Heights, New Jersey, where he played the cornet at camp revival meetings. By 1889 he had settled there permanently, devoting his life to his family and to painting in his solitary studio, surrounded by the battered books, lamps, mugs, and pipes that appear in his art. Isolated in this riverside town, his career began to decline.
Beset by poverty, family problems, and ill health, John Frederick Peto died in Island Heights, NJ on November 23, 1907.
Source: http://www.phillipscollection.org/american_art/bios/peto-bio.htm |
Biography from Newman Galleries:
|  John Frederick Peto was born in Philadelphia in 1854.
He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1878. He exhibited there between 1879 and 1886, the only exhibitions of his career.
He moved to Island Heights, New Jersey in 1889, and lived and painted there until his death in 1907.
His works are in many prominent private and public collections, and can be seen in the museums of Boston, Brooklyn, and Minneapolis; as well as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Smith college Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
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Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| John Frederick Peto was a disciple of the school of American Realism
pioneered by William Michael Harnett (1848-92) and Jefferson David
Chalfont (1856-1931). In their development of the trompe l'oeil
(French: "deceive the eye") technique, Harnett and Chalfont had broken
with the more optimistic tradition of still-life painting prevalent
during the new American Republic and exemplified in the works of
Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825) and John F. Francis (1808-1886).
Though still conveying a notion that the spirit of an object is
revealed in the fact of its presence. (1)
American still-life painting at the end of the nineteenth century began
to favor a more somber, weighty style that reflected both an
"antisocial reclusive ness and a Victorian taste for bric-a-brac and
antique collecting." (2)
A little-known admirer of Harnett, John Frederick Peto was born in 1854
to a Philadelphia dealer in picture frames. His father, Thomas H.
Peto, later became an honorary member of the Philadelphia Fire
Department. The elder Peto also maintained an active business as
a buyer and seller of fire department supplies. His son later
included some of his father’s business cards and printed invoices as
subject matter in his later paintings. (3)
From the sketchbooks that remained in the hands of his heirs, it
appears that John Frederick Peto took an interest in watercolor
painting and drawing while still a youth. He was listed in the
Philadelphia city directory as a painter by the mid-1870s, and in 1877,
he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His works
were exhibited at the Academy from time to time over the next six
years. After completion of his studies, Peto maintained a studio
in Philadelphia and exhibited his paintings at the same galleries as
his friend, Harnett.
Alfred Frankenstein brought to light the fact that Peto actually
painted twenty paintings previously thought to be the work of
Harnett. Apparently, an unscrupulous dealer carted away a lot of
Peto's work without payment in 1905, and forged Harnett's signature on
these largely unsigned works. This discovery and the research
carried out by Frankenstein and Wolfgang Born in the 1940s led to a
renewed interest in works painted in the trompe'l'oeil technique.
Peto's approach to trompe l'oeil was less imitative, softer and more
tonal than those of Harnett and Haberle. Their conceptual realism
was reminiscent of the jewel-like clarity of late Gothic
paintings. Peto's work displays his interest in and knowledge of
French Impressionism. His brushwork is “less meticulous and more
evident than Harnett's, and Peto worked with more opaques, often
achieving a Vermeer-like silvery cast. (4)
Also, as with Harnett's paintings, Peto's still-life subjects sometimes
contained musical instruments, including the violin. He also
entertained a special interest in Abraham Lincoln, as tributes to this
President are evident in many of his paintings. Peto is noted also for
his "rack" paintings, in which "shallow objects, mounted bulletin-board
fashion, appear to stand forward from the picture plane.” (5)
In 1887, Peto and his wife built a house in the New Jersey coastal
community of Island Heights. Here he lived his remaining years in
obscure simplicity, supporting himself by playing the coronet at
Methodist revival meetings and selling his paintings at the local
drugstore to friends and business people.
Sources:
1. The reader is encouraged to consult Barbara Novak's insightful thesis on American still life painting in her book American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience, (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
2. John Wilmerding The Art of John F. Peto and the Idea of Still life Painting in Nineteenth Century America, (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 29.
3. Alfred Frankenstein, After the Hunt: William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters, 1870-1900, Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969.
4. Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art, Volume II, (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986) 497.
5. Ibid.
Submitted by the Staff, Columbus Museum |
Biography from Spanierman Gallery:
| John Frederick Peto spent the majority of his career working in
relative obscurity in the small coastal town of Island Heights, New
Jersey, away from mainstream art circles. However, he is
recognized today as one of America’s foremost exponents of trompe
l’oeil still life, a mode of painting that was highly popular during
the late nineteenth century, practiced by the likes of William Harnett
(1848-1892) and John Haberle (1856-1933). Peto’s artfully composed
still lifes, which range from the whimsical to the meditative, are
comprised of worn, commonplace objects that, through a skillful
manipulation of color, form and composition, he imbued with deeper
meaning, all the while impressing us with his ability to obscure the
boundaries between reality and illusion.
Peto was born in
Philadelphia on 21 May 1854, one of four children of Thomas Hope Peto,
a picture-frame gilder and dealer, and his wife Catherine. He
spent part of his childhood living with his grandmother, Mrs. William
Hoffman Ham, during which time he developed an interest in drawing and,
following the example of his father, learned to play the coronet.
Although his contemporaries described him as a self-taught artist, Peto
is known to have attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts from 1877 to 1879, where he met and became friendly with the
aforementioned Harnett. Between 1879 and 1887 he exhibited several
still lifes at the academy’s annual exhibitions, as well as at the
Philadelphia Society of Artists and at Earle’s Galleries.
Peto’s
early still lifes consisted of arrangements of Victorian objects and
bric-a-brac that reveal the influence of Harnett, whose technique and
iconography were frequently copied by other artists. However, by
the late 1880s, as he matured as an artist, his work became
increasingly inventive and highly personal in tone. While both men
favored close-up, informal arrangements of objects related to the male
preserve, such as pipes, beer mugs and newspapers, their styles were
quiet different, Peto preferring soft contours, thickly painted
surfaces, a concern for light effects and a bright palette while
Harnett favored tight designs, crisp brushwork, deep hues and a
polished surface.
In addition to conventional tabletop still
lifes, Peto liked to paint colorful and sometimes humorous
illusionistic card racks in which fairly shallow objects such as
letters, cards and photographs are shown mounted bulletin-board fashion
and appear to project forward from the picture plane, as evident in
works such as Rack Picture for William Malcolm Bunn (1882;
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.); notable for their
near-abstract designs, their arrangements of overlapping forms and
their striking patterns, textures and coloration, these paintings
reveal Peto’s sensitivity to the same pictorial concerns that would be
explored by a later generation of modernist painters such as Pablo
Picasso. Peto’s oeuvre also includes portrayals of well-used
objects hanging on old doors or wall boards or arranged in shadowy
settings, among them such well known oils as The Old Violin
(ca. 1890; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); these paintings
convey a melancholic beauty and a poignant sense of the passage of time
that was quite different from the cheerful and sharply painted still
lifes produced by the majority of the artist’s colleagues.
While
Harnett enjoyed a steady flow of patrons throughout his career, as well
as widespread recognition from both the public and the art press, Peto
worked in isolation, often taking commissions for painted and
photographic portraits in order to support himself. In 1889,
after spending two year commuting from Philadelphia, he moved
permanently to Island Heights where he made a living by playing coronet
for the Island Heights Camp Meeting Association, a religious
organization. He continued to paint but shunned the major
national annuals in favor of informal exhibitions at inconspicuous
venues such as the local drugstore, where he sold his still lifes to
friends, local merchants and summer tourists. In contrast to most
artists, Peto did not leave any record books or inventories, nor did he
make any comments on his work or on art in general.
He died in
1907 in New York City, his final years complicated by personal
problems, including a lawsuit over an inheritance and complications
from Bright’s Disease, a painful kidney ailment.
In 1905 a
Philadelphia-based art dealer purchased a number of Peto’s still lifes
and forged Harnett’s name to them. These works eventually
commanded high prices and were acquired by major institutions and
collectors. The “deception” went unnoticed until 1949, when the
scholar Alfred Frankenstein identified about twenty paintings
attributed to Harnett as Peto’s, basing his conclusions on a comparison
of style and choice of pigment; his groundbreaking work marked this
talented artist’s subsequent rediscovery by the art world, bringing him
to the forefront of the tradition of trompe l’oeil painting in the
United States. 1
Examples of Peto’s work can be found in major
public collections throughout America, including the High Museum of
Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Brooklyn Museum; the
Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Dallas
Museum of Art; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Los Angeles
County Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Art Institute; Yale University
Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Fine Arts
Museum of San Francisco, M.H. de Young Museum; the Phillips Collection,
Washington, D.C.; and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown,
Ohio.
CL
©The essay herein is the property of Spanierman
Gallery, LLC and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery, LLC. It may not
be reproduced without written permission from Spanierman Gallery, LLC
nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to
Spanierman Gallery, LLC.
1 See Alfred Frankenstein, "Harnett: True and False," Art Bulletin 31 (March 1949): 38-56, and more recently, John Wilmerding's Important Information Inside: The Art of John F. Peto and the Idea of Still-Life Painting in Nineteenth Century America (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1983).
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