Three rediscovered paintings of currency by John Haberle.

Three rare and important trompe l'oeil paintings depicting currency by the New Haven artist John Haberle have recently appeared on the art market. Haberle was a unique figure in nineteenth-century American still-life painting because of his technical brilliance in the art of trompe l'oeil and his inclusion of witty pictorial details in his compositions. Painting currency was his speciality, and he was so talented that William Michael Harnett (1848-1892), who also painted money, commented: "I have never seen such remarkable reproductive talents anywhere." (1) Haberle's output was limited--at most he probably produced about twenty currency paintings between 1886 and 1896, when his eyesight weakened and he had to abandon such meticulous work.

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Small Change (Figs. 1, 1a) is a previously unknown currency painting composed of five objects. At the top is what appears to be a copper coin issued by the state of Connecticut in 1787 bearing a figure of Liberty. Beneath it are represented a ten-cent United States paper certificate decorated with a glowering portrait of Millard Fillmore and a well-worn twenty-five-cent United States paper certificate decorated with a dignified portrait of George Washington. The torn lower left side of the twenty-five-cent certificate has been mended with a postage stamp, the back of which is depicted in the painting. Paper certificates, or the "people's money," (2) were fractional currency issued by the federal government. Used for making small change during the Civil War, when metal for minting coins was not available, they circulated briskly. Contemporary slang for the ten-cent paper certificates was "shinplaster," since they were of so little value that they were used to dress scraped shins--functioning as a nineteenth-century Band-Aid. Haberle probably featured the ten-cent certificate as a reference to two 1879 paintings of the same subject by Harnett entitled Shinplaster and Shinplaster with Exhibition Label. (3) Since Haberle often included such small, subtle references in his compositions, these works are sometimes referred to as puzzle pictures. In the lower right-hand corner of Small Change Haberle painted a tintype of himself, held in place by an unidentified coin or token. He included this self-portrait in some of his later paintings.

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