The Irish Question

De Scott Evans, the Ohio-born painter who worked as a trompe-l’oeil specialist in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, painted this small panel of a single potato, giving the humble vegetable the full apparatus of illusionism — a nail, a length of string and a rough board painted with such exactness that the picture reads as an object hung on a wall. The canvas dates from the 1880s. The title, a pun on the political debate that dominated the decade, turns the still life into a joke at the expense of the viewer, the classic move of the American trompe-l’oeil school that followed William Harnett. Evans’s few surviving panels of this kind are rare and sought after, and this one shows the dry wit and the flawless technique that made him one of the finest practitioners of the form. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.