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: Lacey Baradel has written an insightful essay on The Tramp. The abstract reads in part: “This article explores Eastman Johnson’s The Tramp (1876–77) within the context of a widespread ‘tramp scare’ that gripped the U.S. during the 1870s and 1880s, and situates this significant but little-known painting within the artist’s oeuvre. It considers Johnson’s painting in relation to contemporaneous depictions of tramps in the illustrated press to show how the artist gestured toward—but ultimately diverged from—conventional means of depicting the tramp threat.” See Baradel, Lacey. "Geographic Mobility and Domesticity in Eastman Johnson’s The Tramp." American Art 28, no. 2 (2014), pp. 26–49.
Academy Sketches, Comprising Reproductions in Fac-Simile from Drawings by the Artists, of 110 of the Pictures in the Annual Exhibition for 1877 of the National Academy of Design, with Descriptive Notes by "NEMO," 1877: "A large picture, representing the rear of an old-fashioned farm-house, embowered with trees and clustering vines. A tramp, dusty and ragged, stands at the cautiously opened door, begging for food or a lodging, while a confederate lurks in the lane beyond, out of sight of the inmates of the house."
- Subject matter:
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