John Frederick Peto was the son of a dealer in picture frames. In 1877 he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and exhibited at the Academy and the St. Louis Exposition (1881). His work was virtually unknown until rediscovered by the critic Alfred Frankenstein in 1947. Peto was a friend of William Harnett, and his still lifes are superficially similar to Harnett’s representations of a patron’s noticeboard or desktop. However, the brushwork is softer and more fluid, the light more diffuse, and the selected objects tend to be worn or broken.

Rack Picture, 1887 is a trompe l’oeil (meaning “fools the eye”) painting which includes a postcard size portrait of a gentleman, a newspaper with a dog-eared edge, and a letter placed between a squared-off section made of red string and nails on a green wooden wall. Broken pieces of a picture remain on the wooden wall below the red strings, and several areas of paint are peeling off on the right.