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
Everett U. Crosby, Eastman Johnson at Nantucket: His Paintings and Sketches of Nantucket People and Scenes, 1944, p. 13, quoting Addison Gallery: "It is suspected that a figure considerably larger than the two women to be seen in the picture exists as an underpainting beneath what is now the painted service [sic]. This picture has not been studied either with ultra-violet or infra-red photography]."
Kende Galleries sale catalogue, 1940: "Motif from Nantucket, showing two women talking on a beach, one leaning on a barrel with a basket of cranberries beside her on the ground. Pencil sketch on the back."
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