Catalogue Entry
Like many artists in the nineteenth century, Johnson often did paintings of “types” that are actually identifiable portraits. For example, the painting John F. Sylvia shows a Nantucket miller in his barn looking up from his account books to look out the window. Called at one time The Falling Market, the subject suggests a man perhaps assessing his position in the economy in the early years of the 1870s when a recession gripped the nation. —PH
Hills, 2022: Although John I. H. Baur owned and annotated a copy of the catalogue of Johnson's 1907 Estate Sale, he did not include this work in his own 1940 catalogue listing; he must have obtained it after publication.
MacGibeny, 2021: In addition to the 1907 Estate Sale description of the painting, which conjures a characteristic Nantucket figure by Johnson, a line from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Chapter 14, reinforces the likely subject matter: "And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland."
"Signed at the lower right, E. J.
Height, 18 ½ inches; width, 14 ½ inches"
[Annotation: “62.00”]
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- Subject matter: