The Poor Man's Store

still-life

This painting depicts a shabby but colourful storefront window with brightly coloured candies, peanuts, gingerbread, and fruit for sale. It is surrounded by a wooden frame illusionistically painted to simulate a door, shelf, and wall. This canvas belongs to the school of trompe loeil paintings associated with William Michael Harnett with whom Peto became friendly while living in Philadelphia and borrowed many of his subjects and compositional devices.

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About the Artist

John Frederick Peto

1854 – 1907

American painter. He trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1877-78), Philadelphia, where he became a friend of William Michael Harnett whose work was a dominant influence on his oeuvre. Peto maintained a studio in Philadelphia, exhibiting at the Academy from 1879 to 1887; he earned a living through occasional work as a photographer, sculptor and painter. After moving to Island Heights, NJ, in 1889, he stopped exhibiting at the Academy and sank into obscurity. While Peto's oeuvre reveals him starting out from the genre of trompe-l'oeil in the manner of Harnett, it shows him arriving, in his latter years at a style closer to the maxims of the avant-garde. Many of his paintings which are close to the style of Harnett were for a long time attributed to the latter.

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