Eastman Johnson's portrait of aging New England

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Teresa A. Carbone

28 In the first paragraph of that book Stowe wrote of the "hard but expressive physiognomy" of New England seafarers: "A clear blue eye...white hair, bronzed, weather-beaten cheeks, and a face deeply lined with the furrows of shrewd thought and anxious care" (p. 7).

29 pp. 44-45. According to the preface of the 1894 edition, Jewett had undertaken Deephaven because she feared traditional New England was being swept away by an insensitive generation. She sought to replace "the caricatured Yankee of fiction" in the minds of her readers (1877; Boston, 1894), p. 3.

30 In the Timken Museum of Art, San Diego.

31 Frame 476, reel D30, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of Artists' Letters, 1800-1830, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; transcribed in Carbone and Hills, Eastman Johnson, p. 255.

32 "The Summer Haunts of American Artists," Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, vol. 30, no. 6 (October 1885), p. 854.

33 The shop stood on Liberty Street, at the back of Henry Coffin's property. See Everett U. Crosby, Eastman Johnson at Nantucket: His Paintings and Sketches of Nantucket People and Scenes (privately printed, Nantucket, Massachusetts, 1944), p. 19.

34 "Spring Exhibition, National Academy," Art Review, vol. 1, no. 6 (April 1887), p. 2.

35 Apparently having read something by the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), Johnson wrote to Jervis McEntee on August 13, 1883: "I have just heard that 'an incident force falling on an aggregate containing like and unlike units segregates the like and separates the unlike' - That is what some fellow states in so many words down there at the Concord School of Philosophy... 'on the one hand the homogeneous becomes the heterogeneous and the heterogeneous becomes even more so'...and if half he says is true of course there is no knowing what with happen next" (frames 254-255, reel 4707, Jervis McEntee Papers, 1850-1905, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.). For Johnson's relation to transcendentalism see Carbone and Hills et al., Eastman Johnson, pp. 229, 232; the letter to McEntee is transcribed in full on pp. 256-257.

36 Another version of the composition includes a young boy who observes the old man with curiosity. It is in the collection of a descendant of the artist.

37 Illustrated in Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson (Clarkson Potter, New York, in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1972), p. 111.

38 Quoted in John I. H. Baur, An American Genre Painter: Eastman Johnson 1824-1906) (Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, New York, 1940), p. 26.

39 Edgar French, "An American Portrait Painter of Three Historical Epochs," World's Work, vol. 13, no. 2 (December 1906), p. 8307.

40 Will H. Low (1853-1932), who attempted to replicate in Nantucket his Barbizon experience of painting rural types, wrote of Johnson's affinity for his subjects, saying that he was "not so removed in type... from some of the retired captains that he painted so well...mingled with his neighbors on terms that explain in his work...the complete fidelity of type" (A Chronicle of Friendships, 1873-1900 [Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1908], p. 267).