Eastman Johnson's portrait of aging New England

Teresa A. Carbone

In recent decades cultural historians have probed deeply into the complex meanings of New England for post-Civil War generations of Americans.(1) The artist Eastman Johnson is included regularly in such studies because his roots were in rural Maine and he held fast to a New England identity even after a successful stay in Europe and residence in New York City over the course of nearly fifty years.

As a critic commented in a review of a memorial exhibition of Johnson's work a year after his death: "Maine or Nantucket, the painter all his life remained an unmistakable 'Down Easter,' in his outward way and modes of speech, as well as in his ways of thinking and in his shrewd and humorous outlook on life."(2) Johnson claimed his New England identity primarily through his subject matter, which he sought in Maine throughout the 1860s and in Nantucket, Massachusetts, during annual sojourns from 1870. The reception of his mature New England paintings was shaped in part by his earliest production - fine crayon portraits of Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, among others, in their prime. With such ties to a group of New England's greatest pre-Civil War thinkers and writers, Johnson bore the imprimatur of historical privilege throughout his career.

Johnson's works, most frequently cited for their suggestion of a bygone New England, are less about identifiable locales than generalized interiors. The hearths and worn plaster walls are distinctive for their sparse, emblematic details and air of authentic but benign decay. He peopled these interiors with a cast of aging New England types. Rejecting Puritans in costume or colonial spinners,(3) he chose age alone to evoke a past that lingered in the declining population of his time. His canvases of the 1860s portray the elderly figures in a traditional family structure, signifying the spiritual discipline and industriousness on which New England culture was founded. By the 1870s he tended toward a more unencumbered vision of maturity modeled on the aging male population of Nantucket. In those compelling works he recorded the physical decline and psychological isolation that paralleled the waning of a regional way of life.

Johnson introduced the old New Englander into his work in the summer of 1860, when he returned to his childhood home of Fryeburg, Maine, to paint the surviving features of rural life.(4) He may have been inspired by the pro-Union art critic for the Knickerbocker, who exhorted: "Be true to the indigenous poesy of the soil which cherishes you."(5)

Johnson's Corn Husking (Pl. VII) was exhibited at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1861, which opened three weeks before the bombardment of Fort Sumter and was still running when nearly two hundred thousand New Yorkers rallied in Union square in support of the Union cause. Johnson's inclusion of the inscription "Lincoln and Hamlon" on the barn door in Corn Husking is a reference to Lincoln's running mate in 1860, Hannibal Hamlin (1809-1891) of Maine. In this way he recorded New England's early alignment with the Republican cause, for Lincoln won a clear majority in Maine, whereas New York City voted overwhelmingly for the anti-Republican fusion ticket.

Johnson's subsequent production of what he called "Down east"(6) scenes was dominated by his effort to produce a large and profitable canvas on the theme of maple sugaring, which he never painted despite producing preparatory figure studies. Having viewed the series of studies, Henry T. Tuckerman (1813-1871) praised Johnson for capturing

Maine, of old....rare materials...becoming more rare and less picturesque as locomotive facilities reduce costume, dress, speech, and even faces, to a monotonous uniformity.(7)

The self-conscious retrospective subject matter of the visual arts after mid-century followed on the heels of a literary movement that attempted to reanimate the customs, dialects, and details of regional societies in decline. The early novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) began the trend, which steadily gained momentum during the war years.(8) More than one artist heeded critics such as the Knickerbocker writer who urged the cultivation of a "domestic nationality":

Artists! yield not up the sacred heirloom committed to your charge for a mess of pottage; remember that your eloquent brushes are recording the history of a nation.(9)

Johnson completed his most expansive statements of "domestic nationality" after the close of the war, when, as one writer commented, it was possible to "realize the beneficial effects of this wholesome electric shock upon national art."(10) With Sunday Morning (Pl. X) Johnson offered to a shaken society the sober vision of piety in the New England setting that many Union supporters had invoked as a repository of the nation's moral underpinnings. The preindustrial kitchen, which became ubiquitous in American painting after 1876, already figured in Johnson's Kitchen at Mount Vernon of 1859.(11) His New England Kitchen of 1863 to 1866 (in a private collection) provided the specific details for the more elaborate statement of a kitchen in Sunday Morning. He drew these tenebrous interiors from the rustic realism of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, which he had studied closely in The Hague.

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:

a little town...whose ships have sailed away to other ports, whose inhabitants have followed the ships, and whose houses seem to be going after the inhabitants; but a town in its decline, not in its decay. Everything is clean and in good repair.(19)

Johnson and others like him found much of interest in the insular inhabitants steeped in the traditions of the New England seacoast.(20) Captain Nathan H. Manter (Pls. II, XIV) is among the earliest of Johnson's studies of the island's sea captains. Manter served for thirty years as the pilot of the ferry Island Home before his retirement in 1891, and Johnson convincingly evokes his aging friend's weathered skin and rumpled clothes. As William Walton wrote, "the respectable old silk high hat...would have been fatal to the ordinary genre painter...seldom has so unimportant a baggage played such an important role in art."(21)

Within the first five years of his stays on Nantucket Johnson began to explore the old interiors with the same degree of freedom and directness as he had rendered their inhabitants. Among the most fascinating are two views of the same working kitchen (Pls. XII, XIII) in the eighteenth-century house of the island native Susan L'Hommedieu Ray (1821-1904). Here Johnson's self-conscious effort at authenticity resonates with the descriptions of old kitchens in Stowe's early works. For example, the narrator in The Minister's Wooing exhorts the reader to

remember your grandmother's floor... remember the ancient fireplace stretching quite across one end...across the room ran a dresser....Oh, that kitchen of the olden times, the old, clean, roomy New England kitchen!(22)

The difference is that Ray and her kitchen were functioning on September 24, 1875, the date Johnson inscribed on Susan Ray's Kitchen - Nantucket (Pl. XII). The period paraphernalia that surfaces in renditions of colonial revival kitchens by Johnson's peers are absent here. There is no question that this kitchen is a colonial survival.

Johnson's informal artistic experiments were the foundation for his work on Nantucket, but they were not the paintings he offered to the public. The latter were more directed narrative compositions on the subject of the old people of Nantucket. He offered his first finished canvases depicting sea captains in 1875.(23) He was particularly acclaimed that year for What the Shell Says (Pl. VIII), a shadowy image of a child conjuring memories of an adventurous past for an old man. The painting's great success probably owed much to the accessibility and nostalgic overtones of the story. It was quickly bought by Benjamin Hazard Field (1814-1893), a retired commission merchant and philanthropist who traced his ancestry to the earliest settlers of Rhode Island. What the Shell Says was one of Johnson's favorite exhibition pieces, thus ranking it among the early Nantucket paintings in which he placed the greatest store.(24)

In Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket (Pl. XI) the elderly Nantucketers are seen in the broader context of local society. In this key work, which announced the movement of his style toward freer brushwork, Johnson offered a traditional American subject that was received as factual and contemporary. One critic wrote:

The New-York Tribune critic noted that "These people are not posing, nor making believe at husking. Look at the three old men at the fore end of the left-hand line."(26) Johnson's finely executed drawings for the work bear out this comment (see frontispiece).(27)

The most interesting literary parallel to Johnson's new direction is a series of stories by Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) published in 1877 under the title Deephaven. Stylistically modeled on the early chapters of Stowe's Pearl of Orr's Island,(28) Jewett captures local color in relating the story of two young ladies who come to know the elderly inhabitants of a declining maritime village. Her young protagonists described the old New England sea captains as

blown about by so many winter winds, so browned by summer suns and wet by salt spray, that their hands and faces look like leather....These were not American faces, but belonged rather to the days of the early settlement of the country, the old colonial times.(29)

In 1879 Johnson began to develop his ultimate statement on age with his unforgivingly detailed Portrait of Captain Charles Myrick (Study for "Embers") (Pls. V, XV). He achieved the same vigorous naturalism in Captain Coleman (Pls. I, XVII). In these faces Johnson suggested the continuity of a community whose members' lives had spanned a century of dramatic change.

After the completion of his grand Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket(30) in 1880 Johnson turned his attention almost entirely from Nantucket narratives to commissioned portraits. The island was changing, as he wrote to Jervis McEntee (1828-1891) on September 22, 1881: "This is no longer such a good place to work in as formerly - This summer there has been a throng of people - A good many New Yorkers and there are various excitements, land speculations & c."(31) Four years later Elizabeth Williams Champney (1850-1922) wrote at length about Nantucket in a more nostalgic vein as

one of the rare spots which preserve the flavor and atmosphere of the olden time. The island - with its types of old men and women that are fading out elsewhere, even in other remote nooks of Massachusetts.... - has long been the artistic "property" of Mr. Eastman Johnson. The man and the place have a natural sympathy for each other. He is chronicler of a phase of our national life which is fast passing away, and cannot be made up with old fashion-plates and the lay figure of the studio. He lives in a fascinating "house of seven gables, "filled with curiosities brought to Nantucket by seafaring men....Mr. Johnson's studio is stored with antique furniture, spinning wheels, and costumes. A row of battered hats suggest the...gentlemen of the olden time that have made their bow to us in his pictures.(32)

Johnson was indeed the accepted preserver of the island's historical past. He was also a romantic fixture and the director of the costume scenes he recorded in his paintings. Few of his Nantucket works are more obviously staged than The Nantucket School of Philosophy of 1887 (Pl. VI), the first genre painting Johnson had entered in a National Academy annual exhibition since 1880. It shows four familiar old seafarers and George W. Haggerty in his shoemaking shop.(33) Originally entitled Old Whalers of Nantucket, the painting was admired for its authenticity and naturalness. A writer for the Art Review commented: "there is no vision of an idealess studio, a weary model, and an artist cudgeling his brains to work up material for the next exhibition."(34)

The painting reappeared at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 under its present title, which is a play on the Concord School of Philosophy, a late effort in transcendentalist education that had run its course by 1888. In a letter Johnson had written a merciless parody of the theoretical language used at the school.(35) With the colonial revival in full swing, Johnson's painting of the old whalers brought the highest price of any work in the National Academy's post-exhibition sale. It was bought by Edward Dean Adams (1846-1931), a Boston-born banker, railroad magnate, and industrialist who traced his ancestry to early Puritan settlers.

Johnson's last representations of aged islanders appear to be deliberately about introspection and isolation. Old Man, Seated (Pls. III, XVIII) of the early 1880s is a more direct and emotionally evocative vision of old age than was achieved by any of his American contemporaries.(36) Embers, exhibited at the National Academy in 1899,(37) was Johnson's final treatment of the theme. The delicacy of the artist's feeling is conveyed in the small drawing (Pls. IV and XVI) for this now-unlocated painting. The old man's reverie is palpable even in the absence of the hearth and bed of coals that were included in the larger oil. Many of the old captains were by then truly gone, and Johnson's own productive experience of Nantucket had ended. About 1898 he wrote to his nephew Philip J. Wilson: "I wish to the Lord...that I would never have to come to this island again....I am getting very tired and hate work, would never do another stroke if I could help it."(38)

In Johnson's era of intense curiosity about America's past, his entire oeuvre was seen in a quasi-documentary light, reinforced by his Dutch-inspired realism. Not long after his death a critic wrote:

Few men have lived through so many epochs....Fewer men have had a similarly rich acquaintance among the people who have shaped American history and colored American life.(39)

Johnson's line of sitters culminated in the old men of Nantucket, whose imminent extinction rendered them as appealing in their dignified dilapidation as the American Indians portrayed with ill-fated nobility during the same era. The artist's friendship with the Nantucketers he painted contributed to the acceptance of his paintings as authentic.(40) Although it remains difficult to distinguish appreciation for authenticity from nostalgia, viewers accepted even Johnson's openly anecdotal visions of old age as serious, for they acknowledged his commitment to memorialize New England's heritage. As a critic wrote about The Nantucket School of Philosophy, "Mr. Johnson's work is more than incidental genre. It may also claim rank as historical art."(41)

A traveling exhibition entitled Eastman Johnson: Painting America is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in Brooklyn, New York, until February 6, 2000. It may then be seen at the San Diego Museum of Art from February 26 until May 21, 2000, and at the Seattle Art Museum from June 8 to September 10, 2000. The curators of the exhibition are Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of the same title (available from Rizzoli International Publications, 800-522-6657).

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.

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).

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

TERESA A. CARBONE is the associate curator of American painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in Brooklyn, New York.

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