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Details / Information for Memento Mori, "To This Favour"

Memento Mori, "To This Favour"

1879
(American, 1848–1892)
America
oil on canvas
Framed: 77.9 x 98.4 x 8.6 cm (30 11/16 x 38 3/4 x 3 3/8 in.); Unframed: 61.3 x 81.5 cm (24 1/8 x 32 1/16 in.)
Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund 1965.235
Location: 207 American Realism
Public Domain
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Did You Know?

Harnett’s family left Ireland during the potato famine and emigrated to the United States.

Description

The Latin term memento mori describes a traditional subject in art that addresses mortality. In Harnett’s example, the extinguished candle, spent hourglass, and skull symbolize death. A quote from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, inscribed on the inside cover of a tattered book, reinforces the theme. It comes from the play’s famed graveyard scene where Hamlet discovers a skull and grimly ponders his beloved Ophelia, ironically unaware that she is already dead. The "paint" in the quote not only refers to Ophelia’s makeup, but also wittily evokes the artifice of Harnett’s picture.
Horizontally oriented painting of a table covered in a green-brown table cloth and stacked haphazardly with books. To the right, a skull sits on a book with a label on its spine reading "Shakespeare Tragedies." Flanking the skull, on our right sits an extinguished candle, burnt down to a stub, and our left a spent hourglass in front of a background cast entirely in black shadow. On our left, the pages of one book flutter open, the cover of the book hanging open, and attached to its book by a thread. On the interior of this cover is written in cursive and quotations "Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come."

Memento Mori, "To This Favour"

1879

William Michael Harnett

(American, 1848–1892)
America

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