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
MacGibeny, 2021: Although the sale catalogue of Johnson's 1907 estate sale lists an inscription of "E. J." at lower right, John I. H. Baur, in the catalogue for his 1940 exhibition An American Genre Painter: Eastman Johnson, 1824–1906 at the Brooklyn Museum, noted only the verso inscription with date as shown above.
Baur 1940, p. 51: "It is a study for A Glass with the Squire ([Baur] no. 61, Pl. XXVI), but in the finished version Johnson used the beardless figure of Jim Folsom ([Baur] no. 60…) instead."
"Signed at the lower right, E. J.
Height, 15 inches; width, 10 inches."
[Annotation: “85.00 / Cogswell"]
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