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Artist or Maker: William Michael Harnett (1848-1892)

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Description: To This Favor--A Thought from Shakespeare
signed with initials in monogram and dated 'WM Harnett./1879' (lower left)
oil on canvas
24 1/4 x 20 1/4 in. (61.6 x 51.4 cm.)

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Provenance: Private collection, Hartford, Connecticut.
Berry-Hill Galleries, New York.

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Published: Berry-Hill Galleries, American Paintings: 1850-1950, New York, 1981, p. 13, illustrated.
B.S. Groseclose, "Vanity and the Artist: Some Still-Life Paintings by William Michael Harnett," The American Art Journal, vol. 19, no. 1, 1987.
C. Mandeles, "Grave Counsel: Harnett and Vanitas," William M. Harnett, New York, 1992, pp. 254-5, fig. 117, illustrated.

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Notes: PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTION

The present work is one of three known vanitas images dating from William Harnett's early career. The first part of the title is from William Shakespeare's play, Hamlet (Act V, Scene I): "Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick. To this favor she must come." A second version of this subject entitled To This Favor and also dated 1879, is in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Both works contain the same skull, books and quotation from Hamlet. These two paintings also relate to Harnett's Mortality and Immortality of 1876, in the collection of the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas.