Eastman Johnson's portrait of aging New England

Paralleling contemporary fiction writings, Sunday Morning represents the perpetuation of a visibly arduous early way of life amid turbulent change at mid-century. The Sabbath observance is in keeping with what Stowe described as the "intense realities" of "soul and spiritual life" in old New England.(12) However, several elements set this scene apart from the many narrative paintings of Bible readers produced by Johnson's peers. The humbleness of the setting contrasts uneasily with the startlingly colorful export porcelain parrots on the mantel, which suggest the bygone prosperity of New England's China trade. There is also a gap between the generations. The grandparents, seated on the worn hearth of the vast fireplace, abide by a strict religious code, embodying the old sea captain and his wife described by Stowe in her New England novel The Pearl of Orr's Island of 1862.(13) The younger generation, particularly the young man who fingers a gold ring and the bearded man who irreverently crosses his legs, seems distracted from the Sunday discipline. The scene appears to parallel its literary counterparts in suggesting a rejection of the harshness of patriarchal Calvinism.(14) Sunday Morning nonetheless remained a pious image to Johnson's viewers. The artist was pronounced a "sincere man and conscientious painter"(15) by his patron Robert L. Stuart (1806-1882), a sugar refiner of Scots descent, ardent Presbyterian, advocate of Sabbath observance, and a collector of Bibles.

When they next reappeared in a major canvas, Johnson's elderly New Englanders had a less central but subtly fundamental position in the family circle. In The Pension Claim Agent (Pl. IX), which was unanimously declared the most important entry in the 1867 National Academy exhibition, the parents of the wounded veteran listen as the young man relates the circumstances of his injury to the government agent. Here the artist moved toward a more palpable realism both in rendering the soldier's truncated leg and in a keener sense of material detail. One critic credited his rendering of the bedclothes to a firsthand knowledge of the conditions of the rural poor.(16) Every aspect of the interior demonstrates the cleanliness, moral character, and industry that the government required of pensioners and their families. This plain and honest style of life is personified by the woman knitting (with patriotic red and blue yarn) and the man listening intently from his plain wooden rocking chain The critic Russell Sturgis (1836-1909) wrote that the picture is "at once a memorial of the war, and of New England domestic life."(17) The canvas must have been particularly meaningful in the northeastern United States, for there the Union victory resonated as the triumph of New England traditions.

Beginning in 1870, Johnson effected a major infusion of New England subject matter into his work when he began to make yearly sojourns to the island of Nantucket. His choice of Nantucket was somewhat less deliberate than is currently thought. It was a moment of personal crisis coupled with his wife's poor health after giving birth to their only child. At a friend's suggestion he chose Nantucket over Narragansett, Rhode Island, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, or Saco, Maine, "to meet his desire for a quiet and incurious locality."(18) On the other hand, Johnson was surely not entirely unaware of Nantucket's aesthetic potential. In 1866 a writer for the Atlantic Monthly described the island as: