In June 1869 Johnson married Elizabeth Buckley of Troy, New York, and the following summer he and his wife and their baby, Ethel, went to Nantucket, Massachusetts for the season. Johnson responded enthusiastically to Nantucket, which seemed to be filled with characters and activities that appealed to him, and the couple returned to the island each summer. Beside painting genre scenes of men, women, and children both indoors and outside, Johnson launched a major theme—the cranberry harvest—a time in the fall when the whole community turned out to pick the wild cranberries ripening in the bogs of Nantucket. Johnson made at least eighteen studies before crafting his major painting, The Cranberry Harvest, which was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1880. —PH
MacGibeny, 2021: The subject is Captain Charles Myrick, who appears in several other Nantucket pictures by Johnson. According to the "Lifetime Exhibition History" published in Carbone and Hills, Eastman Johnson, Painting America, 1999, this painting—which is inscribed with the date 1880—was exhibited at the Powers Art Gallery, 1875-1877. It is possible that Johnson created the painting by 1875 and then inscribed the date 1880 for the Union League Club, Century Association, and National Academy of Design exhibitions in which it was shown that year.
American Art Association sale catalogue, 1899: "A stern-looking old man, with a dingy beaver on his head, sits by the fireplace leaning on his cane. Before him is a girl of fourteen or fifteen who seems to have incurred his displeasure. The faces show the most searching study of character, and both figures are painted with sober reserve. The color is agreeable, and the composition bears on its face the marks of sincerity and truthful delineation of a characteristic American phase of life in the country."
Charles C. Myrick (1797–1883). Captain of the Nantucket coastal trading ship Abel Hoyt, 1854.
Also owned by: The Century Association, New York (2016.1); Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware (1978-57); Nantucket Historical Association, Nantucket, Massachusetts (2006.0027.005); National Gallery of Art, Washington (2008.115.4402); Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (1929.260)
See all Prints after Works by Johnson.