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: Earlier in its history when this painting was in England, a figure was added immediately to the right of the standing woman. This extra figure was there when Hills saw the painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970. The figure was removed later, either before or after the painting was sold to the Timken Museum of Art.
John I. H. Baur, in An American Genre Painter: Eastman Johnson, 1824–1906, 1940, mentions this painting as Cranberry Picking in his note to his no. 56 Cranberry Pickers (titled The Cranberry Harvest in this Eastman Johnson catalogue raisonné), but does not include it in his catalogue.
1970, 2nd examination (possibly 1970-10-27): Flecks of green—flattened out. Bright yellow green, orange, yellow. Sign at left "No pass over this cranberry lot" tree. Blue sky / pink light on [sic]. Colors: Woman in foreground smiling—glow infuses whole face. Red sleeves, black shawl, straw hat and blue tie on it. Beautiful quality of light. Red dress and pink sleeves. Red berries tumbling out L.R. Boy carrying child. Donkey looks fuzzy. Three children at left—young girl looks at boy. Focus on two foreground figures—standing woman, girl on knees at right. Figures in background, beautiful swing to body.
1970, 3rd examination (possibly 1970-10-27): Sign: "No pass over the [sic]/Cranberry Lot." Standing woman: bright spots of light in peach on cheeks, nose, chin and upper and lower lip. Dabs of yellow on dress of woman behind. Very free grass and flowers. Smile on woman in front—also red reflection on face. Pencil lines emerge here and there. See girl with yellow bonnet at right. Horse—unformed—head very thin. Very thin on U.R. Blue sky and puffs of pink clouds. Figures look good—sketchy but solid structure. (Inserted figure looks bad.)
2019-06-13: The Cranberry Harvest is a masterpiece of painting, and looks so much better than when it had (back in 1970) the additional figure of a woman dressed in blue bending over—added by a hand other than Johnson—opposite the sight lines of the dominant standing woman. That figure was removed in between 1970–72. There is a joyousness to the figures’s faces as they move along the bogs picking cranberries.
- Subject matter: