“Harnett had to earn his living, in nineteenth-century New York, by painting such trompe-l’œil compositions to decorate public bars, and it appears that he never sold a single picture, in his lifetime, to any of the important American art collectors of his day. He did manage, however, to become a celebrity, for a while, among the Broadway journalists who frequented the bars where his paintings were exhibited. One of these happened to represent a still-life arrangement of various objects that included a dollar-bill which looked as if it could be literally lifted out of the picture and taken away in one’s pocket, so that a legend, probably apocryphal, soon began to circulate about this picture. One newspaper of the period even states that the United States Government sued Harnett for counterfeiting the national currency, but that the artist then won his case in court by pointing out that his dollar-bill was painted on a board too big to fit in a man’s pocket and too thick to be mistakenly accepted in lieu of paper money. I have tried to find records of this strange case in American legal literature, but without any successs.”

(Edouard Roditi, in an interview with Giorgio Morandi, p. 148 in Karen Wilkins’s Giorgio Morandi: works, writings and interviews.)