Like many artists in the nineteenth century, Johnson often did paintings of “types” that are actually identifiable portraits. For example, the painting John F. Sylvia shows a Nantucket miller in his barn looking up from his account books to look out the window. Called at one time The Falling Market, the subject suggests a man perhaps assessing his position in the economy in the early years of the 1870s when a recession gripped the nation. —PH
Nantucket Historical Association catalog sheet, date unknown: "Johnson painted this scene of the interior of the old Round Top windmill on Nantucket in 1873; the work offers remarkable documentary evidence about the mill and the faltering island economy in the early 1870s, recording the forlorn gaze of the miller as well as the structural elements of the mill in the same year the mill was torn down."
John F. Sylvia (life dates undetermined). Nantucket farmer and miller.
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