John Frederick Peto, Job Lot Cheap, 1892, Oil on canvas. 29 5/8” x 39 3/4” Coll: M. H. De Young Museum, San Francisco.
As with so many of the best late 19th-early 20th century American still lifes, this painting comes alive in the trompe l’oeil (eye-tricking) details. The more you look, the more you see, and the more you are drawn into an immersive sense of a time gone by.
Like William M. Harnett, his friend and former classmate at the Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphian John Frederick Peto was a master still-life painter, able to evoke depth and a range of materiality, from worn wooden surfaces and rusty hinges, to frosted panes, remnants of long-gone labels, well-handled marbleized book bindings, and dog-eared pages of books. In this painting, Peto represents a bunch of books arranged helter-skelter in a cabinet. The range of unrelated volumes demonstrates the booksellers’ practice of gathering random unsold titles and offering the entire group (the “job lot”) at a discounted price (“cheap”). Peto’s close-up view provides a telling and very realistic record of the cast-offs of commerce at the turn of the century. At the same time, the artist stages a fascinatingly complex, humorous, and extremely modern interplay between notions of permanence and impermanence, culture and commerce, fragment and whole.