NANTUCKET, MA: On Friday, April 15, the Nantucket Historical Association’s first exhibition of the season, Eastman Johnson and His Contemporaries,will open in the Whitney Gallery, NHA Research Library, 7 Fair Street.
A major nineteenth-century genre painter, portraitist, and chronicler of American life, Johnson first visited Nantucket in 1869, and shortly thereafter purchased a home and artist studio on the north shore facing Nantucket Sound (North Road, now known as Cliff Road). The artist’s island sojourns would inspire some of his most enduring works, including his masterpiece, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (1880).
While living on the Cliff, Johnson was surrounded by retired mariners, civic officials, and practicing artists; Johnson used many of those new island acquaintances—which included several of the grizzled veterans of the sea who haunted Nantucket in the twilight of the nineteenth century—as the subjects of his paintings.
During the post-whaling era of the 1870s–90s, other prominent American artists were drawn to Nantucket for its antiquated charm and picturesque vistas. Major contemporaries of Johnson’s—George Inness and William Trost Richards, for instance— visited the island, joining the ranks of native and Nantucket-descended talents James Walter Folger, Wendell Macy, W. Ferdinand Macy, and Johnson’s friend and neighbor John Alexander MacDougall Jr.—all of them portraying the island’s lush natural settings, interesting characters, and alluring seascapes and landscapes. The recently acquired oil-on-board painting by Inness, Back of Nichols’ Barn, ’Sconset (1883), will also be featured in this exhibition.
The Whitney Gallery is open during library hours, Monday, Thursday, and Friday, 10 A.M. – 4 P.M. and Tuesday, 11 A.M. – 4 P.M. The library is closed Wednesdays, weekends, and all holidays. Eastman Johnson and His Contemporaries will be on display through December 31.
