Catalogue Entry

Hills, 2021: The setting with hearth, objects on the mantel, and high ceiling is almost identical to Grandpa’s Pastime, associated with rural Maine. The face of the young man was drawn by Johnson on his Sheet of Sketches that includes Nantucket sheep and the small boy who figures in another Nantucket scene. (Sheet of Sketches will be added with the Drawings and Prints section of the Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné.) Moreover, the painting is dated 1872, at a time when his subjects were inspired by his sojourns in Nantucket.

The Cleveland Museum of Art website, accessed January 2013: "Set in a rustic kitchen interior, this painting depicts a woman who winds a ball of yarn from a coil looped in the hands of a man sitting across from her at a respectable distance. At the time, winding yarn was a common symbol of courtship that carried humorous overtones of a woman ensnaring her suitor. The second woman in the composition is likely a chaperone. The suitor’s unrefined, open-legged pose, coupled with his uncouth action of placing his hat on the floor, adds further comic elements that audiences at the time would have appreciated."