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 leftmost figure is a Black girl playing with the other children. Here Johnson is acknowledging that there was a sizeable Black population in Nantucket in the 1870s.
According to Eric Vogel, President of the Layton Art Collection (email dated October 19, 2010), this painting was cut down at the top by about four inches at some point. The Milwaukee Art Museum has a stereograph photograph taken at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 that confirms its earlier state.
Milwaukee Art Museum website, accessed February 17, 2021: "This energetic and convincingly spontaneous scene of children playing on the wreck of a stagecoach was actually staged in Nantucket on a platform, which the artist altered in the studio to conform to an abandoned coach he had drawn in the Catskills."
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