Catalogue Entry
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
Hills opinion letter, 2006: "This rustic interior scene represents a standing young woman, modestly dressed, who is in the act of removing a hairpin from a packet of pins, which she has presumably received from the old gentleman with the silk top hat. He sits in a Windsor chair with hands clasped over his woven basket and looks up at her. On the chair next to him are objects that he has brought, including some small hats, stockings, a sheet of white buttons, an ink bottle, perhaps bars of soap, etc. A sleepy dog sits on the floor. Between the two figures is another small basket on which rest a box (or boxed book?) and mittens. On the left is a pot-bellied stove with vents that emit a bright orange-red glow. The painting is filled with such details, all of which are characteristic of Johnson’s interiors of the 1870s."
Captain Nathan H. Manter (1818–1897). “The most famous of the old Nantucket steam-ship captains, retiring from service in 1891, having been employed on Island steamers about forty years, thirty of which were on the Island Home” [Letter from Richard C. Kugler, Director, Whaling Museum, January 27, 1969, to Mr. W. Myron Owen]. Erroneously reported as killed by a whale in 1851 [1907 Sale Cat. no. 53, Captain Coleman].