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
Verso: Peter Folger Nantucket EJ 1886
Nantucket Historical Association website, accessed February 25, 2021: "Full length portrait of Peter Folger with dark grey hair and beard seated on chair next to wooden table. He is wearing dark coat, pants, tan vest, and white collared shirt. He is holding pipe up to his mouth with his left hand. Right hand is resting on his leg."
George William Sheldon, Recent Ideals of American Art, 1889, p. 19: "In the 'Justice of the Peace' the artist has caught and fixed a type rather than painted the portrait of a model, and has done it so well that one feels that it never need be done again. Here is the New England squire, sterling in his integrity, honest in his administration of the law, resolute, self-satisfied, domineering, public-spirited. The moment that Mr. Johnson showed him to the solid men of New York at a Union League Club exhibition, their response was decided and approving. Many of them were from New England themselves, and recognized an old type; the rest felt that the type was there as strongly as if they had seen the original examples."
Peter Folger (1812–1883). Folger was a subject in several of Johnson’s Nantucket paintings. “Neighbor and friend of Johnson’s during his summer stays on the Cliff. Folger lived at 18 North Street (Cliff Road) and acted for many years as the island’s Commissioner of Wrecks. In his prior career he had served on whaleships, had gone west in 1849 during the gold fever on the whaleship Mt. Vernon, of which he was a partial owner, and took great pride in being well known in San Francisco, Honolulu, Valparaiso, and Sydney. He was also agent for the Board of Underwriters for Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which had oversight of marine insurance” [Exhibition label from Eastman Johnson and His Contemporaries, Whitney Gallery at the Fair Street Research Library, Nantucket, Massachusetts, 2011–13].
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