GEORGE COPE 1855-1929
Fisherman's Accoutrements, 1887
Oil on canvas on board, 42 x 30" (106.68 X 76.20 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 957-0-105

With happy memories of the past summer, he joins together the three pieces of his fly rod.... With what interest he notes the swelling of the buds on the maples ... and looks forward to the day when he is to try another cast! and ... with what pleasing anticipations he packs up his "traps," and leaves his business cares and the noisy city behind ....
Thus does the nineteenth-century writer, Thaddeus Norris, describe the delights of the "gentle art" of angling.1 Cherished as a gentleman's pastoral retreat from the clamor of urban life, the sport is commemorated in George Cope's Fisherman's Accoutrements. The West Chester, Pennsylvania artist, a skilled angler and huntsman whose career was devoted to painting subjects drawn from the Brandywine River Valley countryside, excelled in illusionistic still lifes of dead game and hunting and fishing paraphernalia.
In Fisherman's Accoutrements, Cope portrays no brace of trout from clear-running streams so prized by nineteenth-century anglers, but instead pictures the traditional equipment of the fly-fisherman, depicted in an orderly yet expectant array. Hung from a large brass nail is a jacket, the signature feature of Cope's hunt pictures of the 1880s and 1890s, overlapped by a net and split willow creel. The central grouping is flanked by a hat bedecked with hand-tied artificial flies, and a fly wallet set on a wooden shelf, whose stag's head decoration evokes associations with hunt and fishing clubs. Below these, another shelf supports the butt, mid, and tip sections of a fly rod, delineating a triangular composition whose opposite side is marked with a flask. Between rod and flask lie a tobacco pouch, pipe, and a book or journal, other appointments of the angler's contemplative recreation.
The subject of a fisherman's "uniform" has its roots in seventeenth- century Dutch and Flemish fish still lifes, and more immediately in mid-nineteenth century American and English still lifes of the day's catch with fishing equipment arranged on grassy banks of streams. Cope chose, however, to isolate the gear in quiescent light, referring the fishing experience to the viewer's imagination. A persuasive contemporary influence on this work is William M. Harnett's After the Hunt. Cope adopted a Harnett-like trompe l'oeil style with Fisherman's Accoutrements and other still lifes of 1887, a year after Harnett returned from Europe. While Cope's hanging game still lifes arranged in interior settings anticipated his transition to trompe l'oeil, the vertical format of this fishing subject, its emblematic presentation, and masculine emphasis profited from Harnett's example. The play of textures and shapes-the checkered pattern of the flaccid net against the ribbed swell of the creel, the soft folds and curves of the jacket against the straight edges of rod and shelf-are also hallmarks of Harnett although, in Cope's hand, they seem more descriptive than expressive in intent.
The art of trompe l'oeil and the painter- angler's accuracy of detail, from the hexagonal Calcutta cane rod to the snelled flies, heightens the work's realism. Copes hard-edged brushwork, however, lacks a certain ease of expression, and inconsistencies in perspective and proportion inhibit the fluid passage from real to illusionistic space. Yet these shortcomings afford Cope's still life its distinctive character. Fisherman's Accoutrements was admired as "an artistic triumph" when it was displayed at Bailey, Banks & Biddle, Philadelphia's leading jewelry establishment, and at the West Chester Daily Local News. Cope's paintings were treasured by Philadelphia businessmen and West Chester residents alike, and many remain in Chester County collections.

ELIZABETH JANE CONNELL