Images and Text from: “After the Hunt” William Harnett and other American Painters
 Still Life Painters 1870-1900

Some artists are so good that painting become a “fool the eye game,” trompe l'oeil. Artists like John Haberle and W. M. Harnett liked to fool the Treasury Department who actually arrested Haberle in 1886 for counterfeiting. they arrested him one story goes, until he stopped laughing ... his arrest “... only seemed to have goaded him to produce more and better pictorial taunts.”

Haberle was so good at what he did that he fooled some of the best art critics. The “Inter-Ocean” declared one of Hablerle’s paintings to be a fraud: “There is a fraud hanging on the Institute walls concerning which it is not pleasant to speak.... a $1 bill and the fragments of a $10 note have been pasted on canvas.... ” cont

The Chicago Daily News, thte Inter-Ocean’s rival.. gleefully reported that the painting had been examined by experts in the presence of the artist and accuser . “The lens was used, the paint was rubbed off, and the whole ingenious design proved really a work of imitative art, and a most excellent one. Both bills were painted, the stamp was painted, and the newspaper clipping was painted.”