In 1904, John Frederick Peto painted Lincoln and the Star of David, one of about a dozen pictures devoted to the Abraham Lincoln theme from the 1890s and early 1900s. Peto’s fascination with Lincoln as subject has been connected to his own father’s death in 1895, and it has been suggested that he identified with the slain president as a lost father figure. Peto experimented with imagery and formats in the Lincoln series, and almost always included an image of Lincoln that was widely available at the time: “the source of this likeness, an engraving, was a commonly reproduced and available print, and Peto owned a copy which he made use of for almost all of these paintings. It shows the tears and abrasions of much handling, but Peto also strengthened certain details with pencil, such as Lincoln’s beard, and he repeatedly pressed into the outlines of the president’s face, presumably as a means of transferring it exactly.” [1] Peto took great care when rendering Lincoln in Lincoln and the Star of David. Also included are several trompe l’oeil elements that each evoke the passage of time: the warped and aging wood board, the trailing string with a frayed end, the cigarette and match that have been extinguished. The legacy of the trompe-l’oeil technique extends into the twentieth century through modernist movements including Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism and continues to capture the attention of audiences today. In October 2022, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, opened an important exhibition dedicated to the technique, Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition.

[1] John Wilmerding, Important Information Inside, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1982, p. 189.