A violin, bow, and at least two pages of sheet music hang from a dark, forest-green, wooden door in this vertical painting. The string holding the violin hangs from a nail at the top center of the composition. The violin takes up the top two-thirds of the painting. The wood body of the instrument is a deep chestnut brown alongside the fingerboard, and it lightens to tawny brown at the corners. White powder coats the strings near the bridge and gathers on the instrument beneath it, where the strings are played. The bow hangs to our right, and it and the violin overlap sheets of music, which curl at the corners.
   Several pins or nails are pounded into the wooden door, and a few small holes and vertical cracks mar its surface. The door’s handle is a metal ring hanging at the center to our left, and bracket-shaped arms of two rusty hinges nearly span the width of the painting from the right edge. A bolt is missing from the top hinge, and the rightmost section of the bottom hinge has been broken off. A scrap of newspaper is pasted on the door just below the violin, to our left, but the text is illegible. Finally, the corner of a pale blue envelope has been tucked into the edge of the painting near the lower left. A black and white postage stamp with the number 25 is affixed to the upper right corner, and the envelope has been stamped several times. Cursive writing of the address reads, “W. M. Harnett 28 East 14th St New York.” The word “Chargé” has been penned in the lower left corner of the envelope. A circular cancelation stamp near the postage stamp locates and dates the envelope: “PARIS 3 27 AVRIL 86.”

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   The Old Violin is one of Harnett's most famous paintings. The subject is deceptively simple; a violin, a sheet of music, a small newspaper clipping, and a blue envelope are shown against a background formed by a green wooden door.

   The painting is also a work of multi–layered meanings involving the relationships between illusion and reality, between old and new, and between the momentary and the enduring. At the heart of such meanings is the transience of time, which the artist illustrated by showing signs of wear and age throughout the painting. Even the songs, one from Bellini's La Sonnambula, and the other the popular song "Helas, Quelle Douleur", are concerned with temporal change. But it is the violin itself, now mute, but worn with use and still dusted with rosin, that speaks most evocatively of past pleasures.

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   William Harnett (1848-1892) was an Irish-American painter of the nineteenth century, whose fame may not have withstood the passage of time very well but who nonetheless was responsible for some excellent work in the trompe l’œil still life genre. Trompe l’œil, meaning “deceive the eye” in French, is a style of painting that seeks to create a highly realistic, three-dimensional depiction of objects, using perspectival illusionism.

   The Old Violin is one of Harnett’s most famous paintings and a superb example of painted realism. The subject is deceptively simple; a violin, rendered in actual size, a sheet of music, a small newspaper clipping, and a blue envelope are shown against a background formed by a green and rusty-hinged wooden door. It created a sensation when first exhibited at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition in 1886, where viewers were enthralled by the technical virtuosity of the picture. A local newspaper reported that “a policeman stands by it constantly, lest people reach over and attempt to see if the newspaper clipping is genuine by tearing it off”.

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