The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 13, 2025

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
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

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.
  • 1965-
    The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio
    -1965
    (Kennedy Galleries, New York, NY, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art)1
    Provenance Footnotes
    1 1There is no record of this painting's provenance prior to the Kennedy Galleries, and the Kennedy Galleries records at the Archives of American Art (A1993-022, box 6) contain no relevant information.  It is possible that the canvas appeared in Paintings of the Late W.M. Harnett on Exhibition, held at Earle’s Galleries, Philadelphia, in 1892, as catalog no. 10, A Tribute to Shakespeare. 
  • The Kennedy Quarterly 5:2 (Jan. 1965).
    Harnett, William Michael, and E. T. Snow. Paintings of the Late W.M. Harnett: On Exhibition, Earle's Galleries. Philadelphia: Earle's Galleries, 1892.
    Elder, Nika. William Harnett's Curious Objects: Still-Life Painting after the American Civil War. (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2022). Mentioned p. 75; Reproduced p. 77.
    "Recorders, Deceivers and Dreamers." The Kennedy Quarterly V, no. 2 (January 1965): 68-128. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 68-69
    Lee, Sherman E. “Year in Review.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 52, no. 9 (November 1965): 124–157. Reproduced: p. 139; Mentioned: p. 124, 154-155, no. 94 www.jstor.org
    "Accessions of American and Canadian Museums, October-December 1965." The Art Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1966): 71-87. Mentioned: p. 72; reproduced: p. 82
    "La Chronique des Arts." Gazette Des Beaux-Arts 67, no. 1165 (February 1966). Reproduced: p. 65, no. 252
    "Recent Accessions in the American Field." Art in America 54, no. 3 (May/June 1966): 45-48. Reproduced: p. 45
    “Annual Report for 1965.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 53, no. 6 (June 1966): 137–171. Mentioned: p. 142 www.jstor.org
    Frankenstein, Alfred V. After the Hunt; William Harnett and Other American Still Life Painters, 1870-1900. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Mentioned: p. 171, no. 60A
    Adams, Celeste, Rita Myers, Adele Z. Silver, and Cleveland Museum of Art Department of Art History and Education. An Introduction to American Art in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1972. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 14
    Price, Vincent. The Vincent Price Treasury of American Art. Waukesha, Wis.: Country Beautiful Corp., 1972. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 158
    “A Check List. American Paintings and Water Colors of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Early Twentieth Centuries in the Cleveland Museum of Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 60, no. 1 (January 1973): 21–35. Mentioned: p. 26, no. 69 www.jstor.org
    Wilmerding, John. Important Information inside: The Art of John F. Peto and the Idea of Still-Life Painting in Nineteenth-Century America. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1983. Mentioned: p. 131; Reproduced: p. 128, fig. 120
    Mandeles, Chad. “William Michael Harnett’s ‘The Old Cupboard Door’ and the Tradition of Vanitas.” American Art Journal 18, no. 3 (Summer 1986): 51–62. Mentioned: p. 53; Reproduced: p. 55, fig. 4 doi.org
    Groseclose, Barbara S. “Vanity and the Artist: Some Still-Life Paintings by William Michael Harnett.” American Art Journal 19, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 51–59. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 54-55, fig. 3 doi.org
    Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Barbara Babcock Millhouse. American Originals: Selections from Reynolda House Museum of American Art. New York: Abbeville Press: American Federation of Arts, 1990. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 82-84, fig. 11
    Cleveland Museum of Art. Still-Life Paintings in Gallery 222: The Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland, Ohio]: [The Museum], 1992. Mentioned and reproduced: fig. 5
    Cleveland Museum of Art, and Alan Chong. European & American Painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art : A Summary Catalogue. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1993. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 98
    Studing, Richard. Shakespeare in American Painting: A Catalogue from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present. Rutherford [N.J.], London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; Associated University Presses, 1993. Mentioned: p. 75, no. 342; reproduced: cat.no. 342
    Kelly, Raymond J., and Flint Institute of Arts. To Be, or Not to Be: Four Hundred Years of Vanitas Painting. Flint, Mich.: Flint Institute of Arts, 2006. Mentioned and reproduced: p. 28, fig. 12
    Adams, Henry. What's American about American art?: a gallery tour in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2008. Reproduced: fig. 11, p. 12
    Arendsee, M., and M. Steinman-Arendsee. "Take the CAN disability aesthetics tour, at the Cleveland Museum of art." CAN Journal (Winter 2019/20): 76-87. Mentioned p. 80
  • New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William M. Harnett (14 March-14 June 1992); traveled to Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum (18 July-18 October 1992); San Francisco, The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (14 November 1992-14 February 1993); Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art (14 March-13 June 1993), cat. no. 12, illus. p. 10, plate 12, pp. xiv-xvi, 148-159 (John Wilmerding "Notes of Change"), detail illus. p. 252, pp. 252-263 (Chad Mandeles, "Grave Counsel"), pp. 309-314 (Thayer Tolles Mickel "Chronology).
    Tulsa, Philbrook Art Center, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939 (27 September-1 November 1981); traveled to Oakland, Oakland Museum of Art (8 December 1981-24 January 1982); Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art (2 March-25 April 1982), illus. p. 156, fig. 8.4 as Memento Mori-"To This Favour," pp. 153-207, 292.
    Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, The Reality of Appearance: The Trompe L'Oeil Tradition in American Painting (21 March-3 May 1970); traveled to New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (19 May-5 July 1970); (not shown at Berkeley and Detroit), cat. no. 28, pp. 6-9, 56-93, listed p. 64, illus. p. 65 as Memento Mori-"To This Favour."
    Year in Review: 1965. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (October 27-November 14, 1965).
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Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1965.235