- Jefferson David Chalfant
Jefferson David Chalfant (
November 6 ,1856 –February 3 ,1931 ) was an American painter who is remembered mostly for histrompe l'oeil still life paintings.Chalfant was born in
Chester County, Pennsylvania but moved in young adulthood to Wilmington,Delaware , where he would spend the rest of his life. Employed by a commercial firm as a painter of parlor car interiors, he began his activity as a fine artist in the early 1880s. Although he had no formal training, he quickly developed a fine technique. His early works are mostly still lifes and landscapes, which sold well to private collectors.Chalfant exhibited at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts , theNational Academy of Design , and elsewhere. In 1890 he was able to travel toParis for two years, where he studied figure painting underAdolphe-William Bouguereau andJules Joseph Lefebvre . This served him well during a career in which he painted genre, portraits and other subjects, but it is his still lifes which may be his signal achievement.His still lifes are painted in the illusionistic trompe l'oeil (literally, "fool the eye") manner popularized in the late nineteenth century by
William Michael Harnett . Harnett inspired many followers, the best known beingJohn F. Peto , but few if any had Chalfant's technical finesse. Often, Chalfant's compositions closely follow prototypes by Harnett, but Chalfant usually simplifies, eliminating secondary objects and details. An example is his "Violin and Bow" (1889) in theMetropolitan Museum of Art .Although he was only slightly younger than Harnett and Peto, he outlived both of them by many years, and continued painting until 1927, when he had a
stroke . He died in Wilmington in 1931.References
*Frankenstein, Alfred (1970). "The Reality of Appearance". Greenwich: New York Graphic Society. ISBN 0-8212-0357-6
*Wilmerding, John (1983). "Important Information Inside". New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-438941-3
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