loading loading
Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné
Patricia Hills, PhD, Founder and Director | Abigael MacGibeny, MA, Project Manager

Catalogue Entry

enlarge
Photo: Courtesy of Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc.
37.1 U.S. Early and Euro Figure & Landscape Sketches

Johnson finished his formal schooling at fifteen and worked in a dry goods store where he began making drawings. Responding to his talent, his father sent him to work in a lithography shop in Boston, probably Bufford’s. Several figure and landscape sketches survive from the early 1840s which indicate the ways he was exploring the human figure and the landscape about him using graphite pencil. More importantly, he began to excel as a portrait draughtsman in these early years; see Themes 43.1–.9, U.S. Early Portrait Drawings.

Johnson's reason for his sojourn in Düsseldorf and The Hague, 1849–1855, was to learn to paint with oil (see Themes 1.0–5.0). To achieve that goal, he studied anatomy while still making graphite sketches of interiors, landscapes, and figures from life. Among his best composed sketches were those done on trips to the Dutch countryside, especially those done at Dongen, the Netherlands. —PH

View all works in this theme »

Hills no. 37.1.30
Seated Peasant Woman Peeling Potatoes
Alternate title: Potato Peeler
1853, July 21
Pencil on paper
8 x 10 3/4 in. (20.3 x 27.3 cm)
Inscribed and dated lower right: Dongen N. Brabant/ July 21./.53
Description / Remarks

MacGibeny, 2022: This drawing is one of nine that appear to have come from the same sketchbook. Five depicting Dongen, North Brabant, The Netherlands, are dated July 12–21, 1853. Dongen would have been a picturesque area for a sketching trip for Johnson, who lived a little more than 40 miles (65 kilometers) away in The Hague.

Like the Dongen sketch Interior of a Dutch Farmhouse, Seated Peasant Woman Peeling Potatoes was destined to become source material for a painting. The woman spinning flax was reincarnated as the woman sewing in his Country Home, 1865. Such reuse of pictorial elements was encouraged by the Düsseldorf Academy, from whose instructors and students Johnson learned, largely informally, 1849–1851.

Provenance
By descent in the family of the artist
Baron M. L. van Reigersberg Versluys, London, great-grandson of the artist (by descent)
[Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1977]
Private collection, 1979
Present whereabouts unknown
Exhibitions
1978 Hirschl & Adler
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, American Genre Painting in the Victorian Era: Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, and their Contemporaries, April 8–May 6, 1978. (Exhibition catalogue: Hirschl & Adler Galleries 1978), no. 42, illus., p. 40, as Seated Peasant Woman Peeling Potatoes.
References
Hirschl & Adler Galleries 1978
American Genre Painting in the Victorian Era: Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, and their Contemporaries. New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 1978. Exhibition catalogue (1978 Hirschl & Adler), pp. 40–41, no. 43, illus., as Seated Peasant Woman Peeling Potatoes.
Related work
loading
Keywords
Record last updated March 30, 2022. Please note that the information on this and all pages is periodically reviewed and subject to change.
Citation: Hills, Patricia, and Abigael MacGibeny. "Seated Peasant Woman Peeling Potatoes, 1853, July 21 (Hills no. 37.1.30)." Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné. www.eastmanjohnson.org/catalogue/entry.php?id=820 (accessed on April 24, 2024).