John Frederick Peto (American, 1854 to 1907)
John Peto, a talented Pennsylvania Academy-trained painter from Philadelphia whose artistic career sadly ended in disappointment and obscurity. However, thanks to the research of Alfred Frankenstein, the art historian who resurrected the oeuvre of Peto and disentangled it from that of William Michael Harnett, we now know that Peto did not stop painting once he decided to stop “playing the art game.”
In 1889, after a full decade of working hard to become a successful professional artist – maintaining studios in Philadelphia, sending pictures regularly to the annual exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy and elsewhere, and picking up odd decorative jobs around town – Peto decided that playing his coronet would be a better way of making a living than painting. He retreated to a house he built for himself and his wife in Island Heights, New Jersey, found steady employment for awhile playing the coronet at camp meetings, and moved there for good. He not only lost touch with the big-city art world, but stopped sending his paintings to exhibitions altogether.
Although he was isolated, and perhaps because he was, Peto did not produce the same sorts of pictures he painted before, when he was trying so hard to win critical approval. Alfred Frankenstein said it well when it said it plainly: “In the latter part of his career he [Peto] was totally indifferent to success because success was totally indifferent to him; since nobody cared, he might as well do as he pleased, and he pleased to do some very remarkable things” (A. Frankenstein, The Reality of Appearance: The Trompe L’Oeil Tradition in American Painting, Berkeley, 1970, p. 94).
Relying on the vocabulary of the trompe-l’oeil school Peto painted still lifes of great tenderness and pathos relying upon just a few books, candlesticks, pipes and inkwells that were without exception old, worn, tattered and broken. “These are truly nature morte,” wrote William Gerdts. “They are the most powerful reflection of post-Civil War pessimism in American still life” (W. Gerdts and R. Burke, American Still-Life Painting, New York, 1971, p. 144).
Certainly, by traditional standards, Peto’s artistic career was a failure. But given the brilliance of his later work, we have come to realize that a more “modern” definition of failure, or success, is in order. The American Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, whose own work fell catastrophically out of favor with the advent of non-representational painting during the mid-twentieth century, liked to remind his students, “Just keep painting. The only way an artist can personally fail is to quit.”
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, June 2009.