Victor Dubreuil (American, active circa 1880 to 1910)
Dubreuil remains a rather shadowy figure in the history of trompe l’oeil still life painting, since little of his biography has been traced. He may have been the son of a French couple, Aime T. and Caroline Ferraro Dubreuil, who emigrated to New York around 1847 (Old Money: American Trompe L’Oeil Images of Currency, exhibition catalog, Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, 1988, p. 70). His birth and death dates remain unknown, but his base of operation in New York is circumstantial. As Alfred Frankenstein noted, “In the 1890′s he frequented a saloon known as the Dickens House at 38th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York. He traded some of his pictures for food there, and some of these pictures, which have survived, contain letters addressed to the artist on West 43rd and West 44th Streets. For at least some time, then, he drifted about the Times Square neighborhood” (The Reality of Appearance: The Trompe L’Oeil Tradition in American Painting, exhibition catalog, Berkeley, 1970, p. 144).
Nearly every scholar who has written about the work of Victor Dubreuil comes to the same conclusion: that the man was obsessed with money. Alfred Frankenstein went so far as to suggest that the obsession stemmed from his never having had any! Dubreuil painted money in practically every form he could imagine: loose bills stuffed into overflowing barrels, wrapped bills arranged compactly inside a safe, or a few notes tacked up on a dark wall in an X-shape, which is their disposition in the Buchanan example and in a very similar work in the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio (see W.H. Gerdts and R. Burke, American Still-Life Painting, New York, 1971, fig. 10-25, p. 154). Sometimes Dubreuil painted a single note all by itself in the manner of a portrait. On at least one occasion he even painted a picture of bank robbers taking money out of a till.
Information courtesy of Heritage Auction Galleries, June 2009.