Card Rack with a Jack of Hearts (c.1895): Art, History and Details

Card Rack with a Jack of Hearts (c.1895) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is John F. Peto (American, 1854–1907).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Like modern-day bulletin boards, card racks were used to gather newspaper clippings, scraps of paper, and other ephemera in one place. Although it is unclear if the items seen here carry symbolic meaning, they nevertheless demonstrate the human desire to collect and recollect. Their tattered state and frayed edges further evoke a sense of memory and nostalgia. The illusionistic quality of Peto’s pictures makes the objects appear to exist in real space. Even the cigarette butt perched at the bottom looks ready to be plucked from the painting’s frame.

Object facts

• Title: Card Rack with a Jack of Hearts
• Date: c.1895
• Creator attribution: John F. Peto (American, 1854–1907)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 95.9 x 83.2 x 4.4 cm (37 3/4 x 32 3/4 x 1 3/4 in.); Unframed: 76.2 x 63.5 cm (30 x 25 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1973.30

A detail from the museum

Living in a New Jersey resort town, Peto sold some of his paintings to tourists.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Alfred Victor Frankenstein papers, 1861-1980, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution [Reels 1376-1377].
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. "American Painting." Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, no date.
• Frankenstein, Alfred. "Harnett, True and False." The Art Bulletin 31, No.1 (March 1949): 38-56.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.