Catalogue Entry
The making of maple sugar was a traditional industry for Maine people, as it still is today. Johnson specifically traveled to Maine, his birthplace, in the early spring of the early 1860s to study and watch farmers as they tapped the trees, gathered sap, and then set up camps to boil the sap down to thick, sweet maple syrup. As scholar Brian Allen has pointed out, during the Civil War years, maple syrup was a patriotic alternative to the sugar cane sugar of Southern plantations [See Allen 2004]. Allen quotes the Philadelphia physician and abolitionist Benjamin Rush, who said in 1792: “I cannot help contemplating a maple sugar tree without a species of veneration, for I behold in it a happy means of rendering commerce and slavery of African brethren in sugar islands as unnecessary” [See Allen 2004, p. 47].
The camps became hubs of dancing, flirting, and jocular humor, and included children mingling with adults. Although Johnson worked on making sketches for years, he never completed a finished version of the “larger & more pretenscious [sic] sugaring picture” that he wrote to patron John Coyle he had planned to make. —PH
Hills, 2021: The evidence for the date range of 1861–65 is a letter from Johnson to patron John Coyle dated March 13, 1864. Johnson states that he plans to do a "larger & more pretenscious" [sic] sugaring picture and is "starting for the country to make studies for a month or six weeks"; that this is his fourth annual trip to Maine to do so; and that he "hope[s] to paint it next autumn & winter."
Inscribed on verso of original frame, in pencil: Mrs Eastman Johnson/Making Maple Sugar/by Eastman Johnson/Susan Ray's Kitchen
2018-08-07: Oil on board with a rough surface. Two figures in profile: one is stirring the pot of boiling sugar; the other to the right looks on. Some snow to the right and in the background. Note that for the figure stirring the right leg has been moved to the right; one sees an earlier outline of the trouser slightly to the left. (see photo detail) Shirt is sketchy with underpainting used to represent the shadowed areas of his shirt. Note a third figure seen dimly beyond the long tap (for sap) in the tree to the right. Objects in the background are dim—characteristic of Johnson’s work.
- Subject matter: