1854-1907. Fifty years ago, John Frederick Peto was an unknown figure in the history of American art; and he had scarcely any reputation during the almost thirty years that he as active as a painter. Today, however, he is one of the most celebrated of the country’s still-life specialists of the nineteenth century, and the story of his rediscovery is one of the more fascinated in the annals of historical art sleuthing.

Peto’s earlier rack pictures appear to have been painted as office boards for local businessmen or, alternatively, as models to attract patronage from such potential buyers, perhaps successfully, perhaps not. Whatever his prospects and his achievements, Peto appears to have found little success in Philadelphia, and growing increasingly reclusive, he moved in 1889 to the small community of Island Heights, New Jersey, playing the cornet at religious camp meetings. While he did branch out very occasionally into land- and seascapes, still-lifes remained his métier, but his later pictures different considerably, if admittedly subtly, from his early paintings. He continued to paint rack pictures, but whereas as the earlier ones were brightly painted, with tightly painted, taught ribbons, his later ones are dark and slack, with the ribbons often broken-truly "pessimistic" still lifes. He painted numerous other trompe l’oeil paintings too, works which did not include rack ribbons, but simulating boards on which papers, envelopes, and photographs were seemingly tacked on randomly, often with a photograph of the martyred President Abraham Lincoln among the images, along with the simulated carving of "1865," into the equally simulated wooden door or support (actually, of course, painted canvas)-the date of Lincoln’s assassination.