John Haberle spent most of his life in or near his hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, where he worked as an engraver, draftsman, and lithographer, and as a custodian and preparator at Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History.  He produced about forty extremely detailed trompe-l'oeil pictures between the mid-1880s and the late 1890s, before deteriorating eyesight forced him to give up painting.