John Frederick Peto
John Frederick Peto
1854 - 1907
American painter. He trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1877–8), Philadelphia, where he became a friend of William Michael Harnett whose work was a dominant influence on his oeuvre. Peto maintained a studio in Philadelphia, exhibiting at the Academy from 1879 to 1887; he earned a living through occasional work as a photographer, sculptor and painter. After moving to Island Heights, NJ, in 1889, he stopped exhibiting at the Academy and sank into obscurity.
Peto’s trompe l’oeil paintings are composed of humble, discarded, worn objects: old books, fishing-gear, lanterns, scraps of paper, small paintings and photographs. While in Philadelphia, he often painted ‘office boards’ for businessmen’s offices. They consisted of papers secured by a network of tapes nailed to a primitive bulletin board. Some include painted photographs of the men who commissioned them (e.g. Rack Picture for William Malcom Bunn (1882; Washington, DC, Smithsonian Amer. A. Mus.). Two examples are Old Souvenirs (1881; New York, Met. and Office Board, 1885; New York, Met.), which features a photograph of his daughter and includes one of his trademarks—a tan-orange envelope imprinted ‘Important Information Inside’—and Old Time Letter Rack (1894; Taylor, MI, R. A. Manoogian priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., p. 218). Both of these paintings bear Harnett’s signature. This is the work of an unscrupulous dealer who in 1905 purchased many of Peto’s paintings, had the signature forged and sold the works as Harnett’s. It was not until the 1940s that Frankenstein uncovered these deceptions.
While Peto was indebted to Harnett for some subject-matter and compositional devices, his style and mood are different. His technique is soft-edged, his brushwork broad with a flat, powdery surface, and his colour subdued but true, often enlivened by areas of bright blues, oranges, reds and lavenders. Peto worked slowly and laboriously, often changing elements in a work or painting one composition over another. The battered objects he favoured are bathed in a soft light, as in the pyramid of old books, Discarded Treasures (1904; Northampton, MA, Smith Coll. Mus. A.). A dark moodiness pervades Still-life with Lanterns (c. 1890; New York, Brooklyn Mus. A.), while a subtle whimsy enlivens Poor Man’s Store (1885; Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), in which the two hanging signboards ‘Lodging’ and ‘Good Board $3.00 a week’ strike a personal note, since Peto’s wife took in summer boarders who sometimes bought his paintings. [Gertrude Grace Sill. "Peto, John F.." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T066756.]
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