The NHA’s new priceless painting adds depth to the island’s art history.

Arts & Entertainment

story by Antonia DePace and Sharon Murray Lorenzo

images courtesy of Nantucket Historical Association's Archives

Nantucket is known for many things, but traditionally not as much for priceless art—at least for those pieces that are available to the public eye. But as of January of this year, that changed with the major acquisition of Cranberry Pickers. Painted by American artist Eastman Johnson, the oil painting joins the permanent collection at the Nantucket Historical Association (NHA). “This is a top-tier genre painting,” Michael Harrison, chief curator and Obed Macy Research Chair at the NHA, says. “It’s great art, beautifully executed by a nationally prominent painter, and then it is also a local scene. Identifiable. It’s commenting on local issues, and we don’t have as many pieces in our collection that really knock it out of the park on all of those fronts.”

Aside from it being an acclaimed and highly sought-after piece by Johnson (who co-founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the 20-inch by 30-inch work tells the history of Nantucket from an agricultural point of view. “This painting links together a number of these non-whaling threads in the island’s story,” Harrison says. Previously privately owned, this is the first time that the work has been made available to the public, let alone on Nantucket.

On view in the Williams Forsyth Gallery at the Whaling Museum, the piece is one of many studies that Johnson painted in the late 1870s while summering on Nantucket. The scene depicts a woman and a man standing in a cranberry lot below a cliff, most likely inspired by the low-lying grazing lands used for cranberry harvesting that Johnson saw from his home on 41 Cliff Road. What makes it stand out, however, is that it is the most completed work in the study—next in line, one could say, to his grand finale, The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (1880), currently owned by the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego.

According to Harrison, the painting reflects a distinct period in which cranberries were harvested about 20 years prior to the development of big commercial bogs. “He’s really enamored of the landscape and the potential of what the landscape shows. He sees this evocative cranberry bog with these people working in it in the fall. And he sees that as a really interesting [point of] what Nantucket has become? Where is Nantucket going now that whaling is no longer the economic interest here?” Harrison explains. “And then he captures this moment [for us] in the island’s history between when lots of whaling ships are coming and going, and when the island becomes developed with summer houses and hotels.”

Cranberry Pickers also illustrates development in the position of women in Nantucket’s late 19th-century society. In general, Johnson started to depict women differently in his paintings around that time, focusing more on exhibiting them as educated, independent and in charge of their own lives. “This fits with that shift in his artwork where, here, we have the woman commanding the scene. It’s the man who is deferring to her and asking her opinion or seeking direction from her,” Harrison explains. A future exhibition titled In the Company of Women: Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson, in partnership with the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, will further examine the topic. It will likely take place around the United States, with a pitstop on the island, in three to four years.