Playing Parrot: American Trompe L’oeil and Empire

Abstract

American trompe l’oeil still life is full of global goods. Attending to this genre within a nexus of trade and colonialism in the Gilded Age can correct for an absence of empire in transnational scholarship on nineteenth-century American art. This context informs De Scott Evans’s trompe l’oeil painting of a parrot, an animal that by virtue of its mimicry could be imprinted with the history of its own colonial circulation. I argue that Evans and other painters deployed the logic of trompe l’oeil—a hyperillusionistic style often belittled by critics as mere parroting—to expose the politics of colonial goods.