Jefferson David Chalfant

Jefferson David Chalfant is best known for trompe l’oeil still lifes, paintings that fool the eye: violins, old almanacs and objects on a board, painted so precisely that they seem real. He also painted genre scenes of craftsmen, such as blacksmiths and cobblers, at work.

He was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1856 and settled in Wilmington, Delaware. He first worked as a decorative painter of railway parlour car interiors and taught himself fine art in the early 1880s. From 1890 to 1892 he studied in Paris under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jules Lefebvre. His Violin and Bow of 1889 is in the Metropolitan Museum, and his work was shown there in 2022 in an exhibition on Cubism and trompe l’oeil. He stopped painting after a stroke in 1927 and died in Wilmington in 1931.

In Bouguereau’s Atelier at the Académie Julian, he records the studio where he trained.