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on August 18, 1861. The green stamp at the wrong end of the upper letter came out on April 12, 1870. The painting of stamps of such widely separated issues is most unusual, and suggests a bit of antiquarian trickery: Davis may have been trying to make his picture look older than it actually is. But if the picture was produced around 1870, it predicts the styles and devices of the Harnett-Peto era in American still-life painting, since Harnett did not begin to paint until 1874 and Peto did not begin to amount to anything until 1880 or thereabouts. A Canvas Back is the earliest known American embodiment of an ancient, familiar folk tale narrated in its classic form by Pliny the Elder in his account of art in 5th-century Athens - how Zeuxis painted grapes so realistically that birds came and pecked at them, and how his rival Parrhasios then brought Zeuxis a painting covered with a veil; when Zeuxis tried to remove it, he discovered that the veil was the painting. There are countless variants of his story, mostly in verbal folklore; in Davis' variants of removing a veil one is expected to turn the canvas around to see what is painted on the other side, and then to find, of course, that the presumed stretcher is actually the painting. (Incidentally, the pleasure one gets from eye-fooling in art lies in the revelation that one's eye has been fooled; an eye-fooler that continued always to be such would be no fun at all.) Among the papers of John Haberle, preserved in his house in New Haven, is a newspaper clipping describing a visit to an artist's studio, presumably Haberle's own. Here the writer of the report saw a drawing board with pencil sketches on it, with canceled stamps stuck here and there, a photograph of an actress, and various defacements produced by scoring with knives and the scratching of matches. The artist told the newspaper man that this assemblage was the model he intended to use for a painting, and that when he was through he was going to paint the things on the other side. The reporter turned the presumed drawing board over and found that what he had been looking at was the painting itself. The thing that holds all these versions of the folk tale together is flatness. A veil draped over a picture consists only of a few shallow puckers; a drawing board with scratches and stamps on it has no depth at all; and there is very little spatial recession in Davis' Canvas Back. Eye-fooling illusion demands as little depth as possible, and no one knew this better than the Pop artists who, like Haberle and his contemporaries, painted postage stamps and dollar bills, not because they were valuable but because they were flat. Haberle also occasionally painted a slate with pencil on a string dangling in front of it; Dine did something almost identical with his "real" knives and tools hanging before his canvases. If Haberle ever painted the drawing-board picture, it is not known to exist today, but in the Wichita Art Museum is a painting attributed to him in which William M. Davis' idea is given a typically Haberlean switch. One sees the stretcher and its keys but the canvas, far from being the blank reverse of a painting, contains a landscape with a lake, a church, a forest, and some cows. The idea is that the artist, dissatisfied with this work, has turned it around and painted something else on the other side. So you go look on the other side. . . . [[image-painting]] 'Five-Dollar Bill.' 1877,o/c,8"x 12 1/8". by William M. Harnett -The Philadelphia Museum of Art.) [[image-painting]] 'One Dollar." 1962, pencil on paper,17 1/2"x 23 [[?]] 1/2".
Transcription Notes:
For the second image, Andy Warhol's "One Dollar" I'm not sure if the sizing I wrote is correct, I put a [[?]] after the number 23.
