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
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].
- Portrait pose: