Memento Mori, "To This Favour" (1879): Art, History and Details

Memento Mori, "To This Favour" (1879) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is William Michael Harnett (American, 1848–1892).

The work and its context

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

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.

Object facts

• Title: Memento Mori, "To This Favour"
• Date: 1879
• Creator attribution: William Michael Harnett (American, 1848–1892)
• Culture: United States
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: 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.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1965.235

A detail from the museum

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

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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).

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.