HABERLE, John - b. 1856 New Haven, d. 1933 New Haven

American painter and lithographer. The son of German immigrants, he displayed an early talent for drawing. At 14 he was apprenticed to a lithographer in New Haven and subsequently earned his living in that field. His only formal training was at the New York National Academy of Design in 1884. Haberle spent most of his life in New Haven, where he was a founder of the New Haven Sketch Club (1884), gave art lessons and was active in art circles until about 1900. In the 1880s he also worked for the Peabody Museum at Yale University as a preparator and designer, occasionally drawing illustrations for its publications.

Towards 1900 his eyesight deteriorated and put an end to his activity as a painter.

The Slate

Chalk crawls animate the surface of the cracked slate, held together by a fading wooden frame. The doodled drawings of a man and a cat heighten the visual humour of the trompe-l’oeil painting. Ephemeral, rapidly blurring graffiti convey the proximity of the viewers’s point of station and underline the primacy of the principle of drawing. The cheerful childish doodles, born of a spontaneous impulse, counter the rational seriousness of adult daily life with a playful free note of intuitive originality, Haberle renders visible the relationship between all types of drawing, whether trained or not, using pictorial means and handwriting. His name is scratched into the frame and also appears written in chalk.