Materials for a leisure hour.

William Michael Harnett.
Thyssen-Bornemisza

This is one of the painting I like due to its hiper-realism.
William Harnett emigrated from Ireland to the US during the potato famine and he was working as an engraver during the day, during the night he took classes at art schools in Philadelphia and New York.

William Michael Harnett achieved enormous popularity with a type of  still life that involved the use of trompe l’oeil (art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that depicted objects exist in three dimensions). This concept, had a profound influence on American Realism painters and a series of great masters of trompe l’oeil arose around the end of the 19^th century. Some of Harnett’s compositions were so successful that they were imitated by his numerous followers.

Materials for a Leisure Hour was painted in 1879 and give us the sense of recent human presence through the steaming pipe resting on the edge of the table, the used matches and the half-eaten biscuit and its crumbs. The sense of fleeting time is also given through the folded-up newspaper in the middle, with its date of publication visible.The painting include a bottle of beer and a tankard. All these objects looks like arranged at random but reveal a sense of harmony and carefully meditated equilibrium.