Charles Bird King is well-known for his portrait paintings, including some of the most prominent figures in U.S. politics during his time, but he is probably best noted for his images of Native Americans, of which he painted many leaders from at least twenty different tribes.

His fame as a fine portrait painter is part of what makes the Poor Artist's Cupboard so interesting: at the time he painted it, he was not doing too well financially as an artist. King lived in Philadelphia from 1812 to 1816, and was unhappy with the way artists (himself included) did not seem to be highly valued in this city; this painting was a not too subtle statement on that aspect of the artist’s world. King participated in exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, although he did not show Cupboard at any of them, possibly because the subject matter might hit too close to home for the organizers. You see, King believed that many of the visitors were only there to look at paintings in the galleries for free and so were not inclined to actually purchase any.

Let’s unpack some of the stuff King has piled in that cupboard: there’s books, notes, bread, water, notices, a seashell, a hat, and more books. The bread and water likely represent the poor diet of the “starving artist” stereotype that King was trying to portray, while the conch shell could perhaps represent King’s lack of success while working overseas. One of the notes is apparently a demand for repayment of a debt of five dollars, and the very prominent title of an open book is The Advantages of Poverty...no subtlety there! To be fair, the cupboard did not belong to King, but to a fictional artist named "C. Palette."

This painting, on display at the National Gallery of Art, can be considered a trompe l’oeil, ('’deceive the eye”) which is a way of describing a painting that attempts to have the objects within look three-dimensional. Some paintings achieve this better than others, such as The Reverse of a Framed Painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts, in the collection of the Danish National Gallery. King does a pretty good job with his rendering of the objects in his cupboard, especially the open books and the notebook at the bottom, which has records of the sale of paintings in Philadelphia.

King was probably not as poor as he let on, at least in his later years, for he built a successful career on his previously mentioned portrait and Native American paintings. However, during what was likely the peak of his career (1830), he painted The Itinerant Artist, which portrays a traveling artist doing a portrait. The painting may have been King depicting himself in a self-deprecating manner, since an itinerant artist would not be as financially stable as an established painter with a studio.

1. There is a tale of missed opportunity behind the Cupboard painting: according to Robert C. Vose Jr., whose family has run the Vose Gallery in Boston since 1841, there was a time (around 1950) that he went to look at a still-life in a suburb outside of Boston. Sitting on the kitchen table were the two halves of King’s painting, which is on a wood panel (if you look closely, you can see where it has been repaired). The woman who owned it was asking $500 for it. Vose was not comfortable with the price and asked to think about it for a day, but ended up turning her down. A month later, the woman called him and asked if she should accept the $750 that a dealer from New York was offering; Vose advised her to take the offer. It was several months later that he saw the painting at the M. Knoedler & Co gallery with a price of $15,000. It's an ironic tale, considering the subject of the work.