John Frederick Peto

A lifelong resident of the Northeast, John Frederick Peto was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Though raised by his maternal grandparents, Peto was likely first exposed to fine art by his father, who was a picture frame gilder. Primarily a self-taught artist, Peto enrolled for one year at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he met close friend and famed trompe l’oeil painter William Michael Harnett (1848–1892), before returning to his solitary practice. He experimented briefly with portraiture but very quickly found his niche in still-life painting, perhaps due to Philadelphia’s stature as the American center of the genre during this period. Peto admired the work of famed still-life painters such as Raphaelle and James Peale, but he updated the practice to suit his own needs, focusing on trompe l’oeil painting—at which he excelled—and often using a camera to take photographs of his assemblages before painting them.

Peto met and married Christine Pearl Smith in 1887, and two years later they moved from Philadelphia to the small town of Island Heights, New Jersey. Island Heights was a relatively remote resort community where Peto had previously visited to play the cornet for local camp meetings. Removed from the artistic milieu of Philadelphia, he continued to pursue trompe l’oeil painting. Though inspired by Harnett’s work, Peto nonetheless developed a singular style all his own. His paintings were known for their emotional resonance and soft, powdery appearance, qualities that intentionally undermined the “deceit” traditionally deemed central to trompe l’oeil painting.

Peto briefly moved to Ohio in 1894, working on a commission for a Cincinnati saloon proprietor. It is likely this sojourn that prompted the creation of and provided the material found in the Terra Foundation's Old Time Letter Rack, which features newspapers, letters, and scraps postmarked with Ohio addresses. He promptly returned to Island Heights, however, and lived there until his death in 1907. Peto died at age 53 of kidney failure, and following his death much of his work was subsumed into his colleague Harnett’s impressive oeuvre. Long deemed the most successful of trompe l’oeil painters and far better known than the reclusive Peto, Harnett worked in a style that differed in significant ways from that of Peto. In the mid-twentieth century art critic Alfred Frankenstein identified a host of Peto’s works previously attributed to Harnett. Peto’s relatively short life and obscured artistic afterlife have led additional irony to his work, which often dealt with memory, loss, and aging. Since his work became disentangled from Harnett’s Peto has taken his place within the top tier of major American trompe l’oeil painters.