Job Lot Cheap, 1878
Oil on canvas, 18 x 36"
Original purchase fund from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, ARCA Foundation, and Anne Cannon Forsyth, 1966.2.10

Upon his death in 1892, the New York Times lamented the passing of "one of the best-known still life painters in the country."  The subsequent rise of modernism, however, consigned Harnett and trompe l'oeil to an unexamined corner of American history.  When Reynolda House acquired Harnett's Job Lot Cheap in 1966, the painter was almost unknown.  Harnett's only retrospective had occurred as a memorial exhibition in 1892 and his only biography came out in 1953.  Responding to growing interest in nineteenth-century American culture, Reynolda wisely included Job Lot Cheap in the original group of paintings gathered to open the new institution.  When the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized the definitive Harnett retrospective in 1992, Job Lot Cheap graced the frontispiece of the catalog.