The panel is decorated with pyrography depicting a fanciful night scene with putti, shooting stars, mermaids, and animals.

A contemporary of the likes of William Michael Harnett and
John Frederick Peto, John Haberle (1856-1933) is the third artist in the triumvirate
that would dominate tromp l’oeil painting in America during the nineteenth
century. Depicting common household items with such intense accuracy, John
Haberle’s artistic process was so time consuming that he was only able to
complete forty paintings during his lifetime. A master of illusionistic
renderings, he was even once ordered by the Secret Service to stop painting
United States legal tender or risk being prosecuted on charges of
counterfeiting.

Passed down in the Haberle family collection for four
generations, The Artist’s Palette (1890) is unique within Haberle's oeuvre in
that it features elaborate pyrographic decoration along with his actual brushes
and palette knife affixed to the background - no other work by Haberle is known
to have included actual (rather than painted) objects. This work is a
masterpiece in that in that is suggests a degree of intimacy and playfulness,
effectively blurring the barrier between that which is real and that which is
represented. Arguably this work could even be said to anticipate 20th century
‘ready-mades,’ as later made famous by such artists as Marcel Duchamp.