Irish School c.1860
A Trompe L’Oeil Still life of Bank Notes, Prints and Correspondence on a Table Top
Pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 43.5 x 65 cm.
The distinct sub-genre of still-lifes featuring banknotes and other objects and paperwork, grew out of the depictions of letter racks by Evert Collier, a Dutch artist who moved to England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The genre thrived in nineteenth-century America in the hands of artists such as John F. Peto and the Irish-American painter, William M. Harnett. Harnett’s ability at painting dollar bills was such that it drew the attention of the Secret Service’s counterfeiting team. The present work is an extremely rare, possibly unique, example of the genre to take as its subject Irish banknotes of various denominations, issued in Limerick, Drogheda and Banbridge, and dating from the 1850s. The provincial Bank of Ireland was one of six banks authorised to issue currency and, as evinced by a comparison with an example (from Birr) of one of its pound notes (illustrated) issued just a few months later, the artist copies his original closely. Visual material also features in the still-life, with a watercolour of an Irish colleen in the manner of Mulready and an engraving after Hogarth’s Sigismonda (illustrated). Set against an elegant blue background and painted with great illusionistic skill, this is rare notaphilic document as well as a charmingly idiosyncratic still-life.