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, 2022: Johnson’s undated cranberry picking paintings, all studies for his planned monumental painting of the subject, have been given the circa date of 1876–1879. The beginning of the range is based on a September 27, 1876 article in the Island Review (Nantucket) reporting that Johnson "took several views from the west part of the town [where cranberry harvesting would have been taking place], to be embodied in one of his canvases." The range ends when Johnson would have started working in earnest on his acclaimed The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, dated 1880 and exhibited at the National Academy of Design in March–May of that year. Johnson had begun to work on the subject as early as 1874, but the manner and extent to which he did is not known. On March 24, 1874, his friend and fellow artist Jervis McEntee wrote in his diary, “I met him [Johnson] on his way down town and walked with him down to 34th St. to [Th…s] gallery after which we walked back to his house. We had a talk about his Cranberry Picking picture which he is working on and a rambling conversation on various matters.” We thank art historians Marc Simpson and Anne Knutson for bringing our attention to these sources.
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