Alexander Pope 1849 - 1924

Sanborn Family, Winchester, Massachusetts
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1981
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1981

Vero Beach, Florida, Vero Beach Museum of Art, The Reality of Things: Trompe L'Oeil in America, January-May 2007

Alexander Pope was a lifelong Bostonian who studied briefly with the painter and sculptor William Rimmer (1816-1879), but was essentially a self-taught artist. His lifelong love of the outdoors and enjoyment of hunting and fishing led him to undertake naturalistic paintings and wood carvings primarily featuring birds and dogs. As a contemporary of William Michael Harnett, Pope belonged to a small group of late 19th century still life painters who were skilled in the art of trompe l'oeil. Inspired by Harnett’s well-known group of trompe l’oeil still lifes titled After the Hunt, one of which was installed in the bar at the Hoffman House hotel in New York around 1886, Pope himself undertook a series of complex hunting still lifes around the turn-of-the-century. As William Gerdts writes of After the Hunt, "It was used as a model for dozens of imitations and variations… but always emphasized a rugged and masculine ambiance, which was derived in part from German nineteenth-century genre pictures.  These similar arrangements in the backgrounds of such pictures became the epitome of trompe l’oeil—the eye was denied access to spatial recession by the impregnable door, and the hanging forms, arranged vertically, projected out into the viewer’s space" (Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life 1801-1939, Columbia, Missouri, 1981, p. 160).

Whereas most of Pope’s hunting still lifes feature only the antlers of a deer or moose, Trophies of the Hunt includes the full trophy head of a deer.  Pope employs the deer’s antlers as a rack for a hunting rifle, from which he suspends numerous other elements, including birds and a powder horn.  As Howard J. Cave noted in 1901, "One of Pope’s favorite pastimes is to paint firearms, birds, rabbits and the like hanging to a slate-colored door, and cause them to stand out with a semblance to reality that deceives the sense of sight. In these feats the effect is produced partly by a skillful manipulation of shadows and partly by a faithfulness in the matter of texture that comes from careful study" ("Alexander Pope, Painter of Animals," Brush and Pencil, May 1901, p. 112). Using a typical trompe l’oeil device, Pope painted a calling card inscribed with his name at the lower right of the composition in place of a traditional signature.