Catalogue Entry

Hills, 2021: Two inscriptions of the name Hartman on the verso of the corresponding small sketch, Feeding the Lamb, 1875, suggest that American art critic Sadakichi Hartmann was given the sketch by Mrs. Johnson in connection with his writing about this finished painting in "Eastman Johnson: American Genre Painter," The International Studio 34, 1908, p. 110.

Hills, “Eastman Johnson on Nantucket,” in Michael A. Jehle, ed., Picturing Nantucket: An Art History of the Island with Paintings from the Collection of the Nantucket Historical Association: Works by Artists Born before 1900 (Nantucket Historical Association, 2000): “Sheep and lambs were a special feature of Nantucket, and Johnson included them in pictures…In the early nineteenth century thousands of sheep roamed unattended over the island’s treeless moors; in fact the division of property among the earliest Anglo-American settlers made provisions for land to be held in common for the express purpose of sheep grazing. In time the sheep herds dwindled but they were still noteworthy in 1847 when Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the island. The poet wrote to his daughter about walking out of the town where he came to ‘a wide bare common stretching as far as you can see on every side, with nothing upon it but here & there a few nibbling sheep."

• Subject matter: 
  • Sheep »