Jefferson David Chalfant 1856-1931

George H. Ainslie, New York
Craig & Evans Art Galleries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Mrs. J. David Chalfant, Wilmington, Delaware
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York
Barbara Lassiter Millhouse, New York
James Maroney, Inc, New York
Acquired by the present owners from the above, 1989

New York, New Century Club, May 1899
Newark, New Jersey, Newark Museum, Nature's Bounty and Man's Delight: American 19th Century Still Life Painting, 1958, no. 4, p. 11
Wilmington, Delaware, The Wilmington Society for the Fine Arts, Jefferson D. Chalfant (1856-1931), January-February 1959, no. 69
New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Faces and Places, Changing Images of 19th Century America, December 1972-January 1973, no. 14, illustrated in color
Omaha, Nebraska, Joslyn Art Museum, 1977 (on loan)
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, The Brandywine River Museum; Newark, New Jersey, Newark Art Museum, Jefferson David Chalfant, June-November 1979, no. 30, pp. 14, 15, 33, 41, 43, illustrated in color
Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art; West Palm Beach, Florida, Norton Gallery and School of Art, More Than Meets the Eye, The Art of Trompe l'Oeil, December 1985-April 1986, no. 37, pp. 16, 77, 91, illustrated in color
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, May-September 1989 (on loan)

Alfred Frankenstein, After the Hunt, William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters, 1870-1900, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 1953, revised 1969, p. 126, illustrated pl. 105
William H. Gerdts and Russell Burke, American Still-Life Painting, New York, 1971, p. 145, illustrated in color pl. 18
Joan H. Gorman, "Jefferson David Chalfant, Still Life and Genre Painter," Art & Antiques, July-August 1979, p. 108, illustrated in color
William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939, Columbia, Missouri, 1981, p. 190
William H. Gerdts, Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting 1710-1920, vol. I, New York, 1990, p. 307
Emily Dana Shapiro, "J.D. Chalfant's Clock Maker: The Image of the Artisan in a Mechanized Age," Art in America, Fall 2005, vol. 19, no. 3, illustrated p. 48

Very good condition; lined; two very faint thin scratches to the varnish in upper right and center respectively, under UV: a 2 inch spot of inpainting at center left edge, a thin line of retouching to center left edge, some retouching along right and left edges to address frame abrasion, other very minor retouches.
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Born in 1856 in Chester County, Pennsylvania, Jefferson David Chalfant followed in his father's footsteps as a cabinetmaker, eventually working as a railroad car finisher for the Philadelphia firm of J.G. Brill. Chalfant moved to Delaware in 1879, where he listed himself in the Wilmington Directory as a "painter," likely a reference to his job as a decorative painter for the Jackson and Sharpe Car and Sash Works. Though he possessed no academic training, by 1883 Chalfant had enhanced himself as a professional artist, opening the first of four studios he would occupy during his career. His early work included landscapes and still-lifes, though it was his introduction of virtuoso trompe l'oeil paintings to his repertoire that truly established his reputation. This development coincided with his association with businessman H.W. Sullivan, a leather dealer by profession, who became Chalfant's agent and later business manager for almost three decades. Sullivan worked tirelessly on Chalfant's behalf, ensuring his works received broad exposure at influential exhibitions such as those at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Providence Art Club, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Sullivan also sold Chalfant's work to important private collectors, including Alfred Corning Clark, a wealthy New Yorker who gave the artist the financial support he required to study abroad in Paris at the Académie Julian from 1890-1892.

The detailed, highly illusionistic trompe l'oeil images that became popular in the late nineteenth century ran counter to the rich imagination and techniques of American Impressionists. Scholars have observed that the neutral palette and particular subject matter of the genre create an almost existential tension, an "artificial division between the artistic ideal – gentility, passivity, purity ... [whereas]trompe l'oeil pictures present the 'masculine' world of the real – greed, aggressiveness, (and) sex... instead of capturing a fleeting moment with vivid and painterly brushstrokes, the trompe l'oeil school attempts the depiction of an implacable reality by the precise rendering of volume, texture, and shadow...." (Plane Truths: American Trompe L'Oeil Painting, 1980, n.p.)

During the four years Chalfant focused on trompe l'oeil painting, he is thought to have created only about one dozen canvasses, with The Old Flintlock (c. 1898) perhaps his final undertaking in the genre. The picture features the artist's own miquelet pistol hanging from a nail on a worn wooden panel. Chalfant's mastery of his medium as well as his eventual decision to move on are reflected in a review in The Morning News from 1899 that states: "In fact, the triumph of 'The Old Horse Pistol' [The Old Flintlock] is so complete as to cause regret among the friends of Mr. Chalfant at his announced intention to abandon still-life portrayal for more varied forms of artistic genius" (in Joan H. Gorman, Jefferson David Chalfant, 1979, p. 15). That The Old Flintlock may have been Chalfant's final trompe l'oeil painting is particularly ironic when one reads the contents of the fragment of newsprint in the lower right quadrant of the picture, which contains the notice: "For the first time in nearly ten years J.D. Chalfant is engaged on a study in still life." The fictitious item is evidence of the wit that was often a signature component of trompe l'oeil constructions.

Creating illusionistic scenes of objects hanging from a wall has been a favorite of artists since Leonardo's time. Chalfant, following in this tradition, also often borrowed his arrangements from William Michael Harnett, one of the genre's most popular contemporaneous practitioners. Harnett's the Faithful Colt (1890, Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art) also shows a weapon hanging from a wooden backdrop, but its subject seems modern compared to Chalfant's ancient pistol. Flintlock arms were introduced around 1630, and quickly became the mainstay of European armies for the next two centuries. By the time of the Civil War, however, flintlocks were nearly obsolete, replaced by more efficient pistols like Harnett's revolver. The choice of such a nostalgic weapon may refer to Chalfant's evolved view of trompe l'oeil as a relic of the past as he turned to new styles and subjects.

The sense of nostalgia, however, is cleverly contrasted by the carefully-prepared and seemingly "untouched" appearance of the surface, which makes the painting seems as if it were somehow the mechanically-produced product of a modern age. Emily Dana Shapiro has noted: "A comparison of Chalfant's canvas The Old Flintlock and William Michael Harnett's painting The Faithful Colt... underscores the lengths to which the Delaware artist went to erase any visible trace of the human touch from his images. While the newspaper text in Chalfant's picture retains its legibility under the scrutiny of the magnifying glass, for example, the printed words in Harnett's canvas dissolve on close examination into blurs of white pigment, announcing the work's status as a painted image" ("J.D. Chalfant's Clock Maker, The Image of the Artist in a Mechanized Age," American Art, Fall 2005, p.47). Ironically it is the replicated fragment of printed paper that mischievously hints at Chalfant's role in the painting's creation. Chalfant's The Old Flintlock masterfully juxtaposes the old and the new, the real and the reproduced, the hand-crafted and the manufactured. The painting is a superlative example of the witty game in which perception is tested and "paradox rules."