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, 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."
