Old Time Letter Rack

A subset of trompe l’oeil painting, letter rack pictures were popular in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Featuring painted tape “racks,” they displayed letters, newspaper clippings, photographs and other ephemera. Rack pictures were often commissioned by businesses or organizations for display in their offices, but their wide appeal spoke to the proliferation of printed material in the late nineteenth century, as technologically advanced printing processes became more affordable and the advent of photography transformed the visual culture of the period.

John Frederick Peto has long been considered one of the most talented of letter rack painters, combining technical skill with compositional and thematic complexity. Peto’s productive rack painting period can be divided into two periods: the first, spanning the years 1879 to 1885, during which time his works featured complex grids with a plethora of calling cards and pamphlets; and his later period, from 1894 to 1907. Old Time Letter Rack dates to the beginning of this second phase and it, along with a number of other rack paintings with the same title, capture the pathos that was Peto’s hallmark.

Old Time Letter Rack features a simplified rack made of wide, linear tapes that are broken and frayed, straining at the pins and fading in places. Objects strewn across the rack mirror the state of the tapes: torn, frayed, or dilapidated, the letters, booklet, and news clippings have clearly been well-used. Trompe l’oeil works from this period were often layered with word play, visual puns, and narrative meaning, and Peto was especially known for the subtle autobiographical hints he often inserted into his works. The worn state of the ephemera in Old Time Letter Rack may be one such layer; suffering from the loss of his beloved yet emotionally distant father, struggling financially and physically, and living in a self-imposed artistic exile in Island Heights, New Jersey, the worn and discarded objects in the painting parallel the artist's state of mind. The newspaper and letters reinforce an autobiographical reading of Old Time Letter Rack: they feature Ohio addresses and post stamps. Old Time Letter Rack was painted in 1894, the same year that Peto and his wife briefly relocated to her home state of Ohio. An artist concerned with the mortality of the material, Peto imbued the physical objects in Old Time Letter Rack with the power of personal history and the significance of place even as he captured the inexorable march of time.

In the decades after his death, much of Peto’s work came to be mistaken for that of his friend and colleague William Michael Harnett (1848–1892) who was a trompe l’oeil painter of far greater renown. Aesthetically, however, Old Time Letter Rack exhibits the handling of color and texture that immediately distinguishes Peto from Harnett. Far less invested in the “deception” of trompe l’oeil painting than Harnett, Peto’s painted surface has a soft, muted look, with a velvety appearance that softens his precise lines.

Nature’s Banquet: American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia (organizer). Venue: Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia, January–March 2010. [exh. cat.]

Terra Collection-in-Residence, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia, June 1, 2022–June 30, 2026.

 

John Moran Auctioneers, Altadena, California (California and American Paintings Sale, October 17, 2006): lot 53. Text pp. 5–6; ill. lot 53 (color).

Nature’s Banquet: American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection and Small Treasures of 19th-Century American Art, (exh. cat., Savannah College of Art and Design). Savannah, Georgia: Savannah College of Art and Design, 2010. Text, checklist, cat. no. 19; ill. cat. no. 19 (color).

Sotheby’s, New York, New York (Sale N09350, May 20, 2015): lot 24. Text p. 46, lot 24; ill. p. 47 (color).

Bourguignon, Katherine M., and Peter John Brownlee, eds. Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook. Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, 2018. Text p. 110; ill. p. 110 (color).