Eastman Johnson's portrait of aging New England

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Teresa A. Carbone

1 See The Colonial Revival in America, ed. Alan Axelrod (W. W. Norton, New York, for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware 1985); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1991); and Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, ed. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., and Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999).

2 Mark Selby, "An American Painter: Eastman Johnson," Putnam's Monthly, vol. 2, no. 5 (August 1907), p. 533.

3 Johnson never included a spinning wheel in his paintings.

4 Johnson boarded that summer with the Day family and used them as models, according to a typescript of 1975, compiled from earlier sources, in the Fryeburg Historical Society.

5 "American Art," Knickerbocker, vol. 58, no. 1 (July 1861), p. 49.

6 Quoted in Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills et at., Eastman Johnson: Painting America (Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, in association with Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 1999), p. 59.

7 Book of the Artists (New York, 1867), p. 471.

8 See Josephine Donovan, New England Local Color Literature: A Women's Tradition (Frederick Ungar Publishing, New York, 1983).

9 "American Art," p. 52.

10 Ibid., p. 48.

11 Johnson based this picture (now in the Hevrdejs collection) on firsthand observation of the decrepit kitchen dependency at Mount Vernon. See Carbone and Hills et al., Eastman Johnson, pp. 122, 125.

12 The Minister's Wooing, in Three Novels (1859; Literary Classics of the United States, New York, 1982), p. 576.

13 In this novel Stowe described her characters as "a pair of worthy, God-fearing people, ... [who] never read anything but the Bible... and the 'Christian Mirror'" (The Pearl of Orr's Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine [1862; Boston, 1896], p. 9).

14 Among the first of these was Stowe's Minister's Wooing of 1859.

15 New York Evening Post, May 17, 1866.

16 Ibid., April 30, 1867.

17 "American Painters. The National Academy Exhibition," Galaxy, vol. 4 (June 1867), pp. 230-231.

18 William Walton, "Eastman Johnson, painter," Scribner's Magazine, vol. 40, no. 3 (September 1906), p. 272.

19 The writer also observed: "The surly Atlantic... growls off the pestilent crowd of excursionists who bring uncleanness and greediness" ("Nantucket," Atlantic Monthly, vol. 17, no. 101 [March 1866], p. 297).

20 "The great majority of islanders are descendants of the 'twenty first proprietors'....The interests of all are the same" ("Nantucket," Scribner's Monthly, vol. 6, no. 4 [August 1873], p. 394).

21 "Eastman Johnson, painter," p. 271.

22 Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, p. 536.

23 See Carbone and Hills et al., Eastman Johnson, pp. 79, 84.

24 This was one of ten works Johnson exhibited in the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia.

25 Edward King, "The Value of Nationalism in Art, Monthly Illustrator, vol. 4, no. 14 (June 1895), pp. 267-268. 26 April 22, 1876.

27 For the role of truth or nostalgia in Johnson's Nantucket pictures see Marc Simpson, Sally Mills, and Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (Timken Art Gallery, San Diego, 1990), pp. 41-44.