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 brass candlesticks in this painting also appear in Man Reading with Woman Sitting by the Fireplace.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition catalogue, 1926: "In an old-fashioned farm interior an elderly man in his overcoat and top hat sits in a Windsor chair warming his hands before a wide open fireplace. Two young women stand at the right near the door; one, mixing a toddy, admires the newly trimmed bonnet which the other holds up."
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