Lot Essay
In early 1864 Eastman Johnson wrote from New York to John F. Coyle, one of his patrons and supporters in Washington, DC, bringing him up to date on his circumstances and plans:
I am getting on well enough so far as commissions and plenty to
do goes, but getting wealth is a hard matter, and will take
bigger prices than I have been getting...I hope in the next year
to do something more considerable than I have yet done, to paint
two or three larger and more pretentious pictures... In
furtherance of one of these I am about starting for the country
to make studies for a month or six weeks. This will be my fourth annual trip for the same purpose to the wilds of the State of
Maine--The scene is a Down-east Sugaring, a picturesque and
to me very interesting one, partly perhaps on account of its
being associated with my pleasantest early recollections...
There will be forty figures or more, the occasion an entirely
social one, even jolly, and very well adapted as I think to
exhibit character and picturesque combination of form color &c.
At all events I am very much interested in the subject, have
spent a good deal of time on it already and not yet begun the
picture nor indeed got nearly all the materials. But this spring will do me, I hope, in that respect. (13 March 1864; quoted in
M. Simpson, S. Mills and P. Hills, Eastman Johnson: The
Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, San Diego, California, 1990, p. 54)
Johnson eventually spent one more season in Maine collecting "materials" for this projected opus. He never realized a final painting of a "Down-east Sugaring," but some thirty oil sketches, compositional studies and small finished paintings related to the project are know today. The largest of these, measuring ninety-six inches in length and inscribed "unfinished," seems to be "the picture" that Johnson was beginning to imagine but had not yet started painting in early 1864 (figure a).
Five oil studies are so closely related to this large canvas that they can safely be said to show Johnson working out his final composition. The Party in the Maple Sugar Camp, at thirty by forty inches, is the largest of the five, the smallest is only seven by fifteen inches (former collection of Herbert Plimpton). All five works share a compositional anchor on the left of two men in conversation, seated by a large woodpile upon which musicians are playing. Between the musicians and the shed to their right, in front of which a man tends a large black cauldron, appears the area that evidently gave Johnson difficulty: this region displays the most variations of incident and focus among the sketches. In The Party in the Maple Sugar Camp, Johnson closed up this area, tightening his arrangement of vignettes. Clustering figures in the lower left quadrant of a relatively square canvas rather than spreading them frieze-like across a long expanse, the effect is one of focus and release. Of all the compositional studies for Johnson's "Down-east Sugaring" picture, Party in the Maple Sugar Camp offers the most jubilant concentration on the "entirely social" aspects of the maple sugaring process.
In 1861, the year Johnson began his maple-sugaring project, the thirty-seven-year-old artist was both eager and well positioned to undertake a monumental genre painting. He had spent a long and eclectic apprenticeship in Europe, working from 1849 to 1855 in Düsseldorf, the Hague and Paris. Johnson received encouragement for this study from the American Art-Union, a promoter of American art in general and genre art in particular, and he used his six years abroad to enlarge his repertoire of subjects by venturing narrative and anecdotal themes. Upon his return to the United States in 1855, Johnson settled in Washington, DC and began to investigate the possibilities for paintings of decidedly American subject matter. In 1856 and 1857 he visited northern Wisconsin, where he made studies of the Chippewa Indians living at Grand Portage; back in Washington he painted Mount Vernon from the window of his father's house on F Street, he found the subject for his first major American work Negro Life at the South, later known as Old Kentucky Home--Life in the South of 1859 (The New-York Historical Society, New York on permanent loan from the New York Public Library, New York).
Exhibited in 1859 in New York, where Johnson had moved the previous year, this painting of black slaves courting, relaxing and enjoying music in the back yard of their dilapidated quarters established Johnson's reputation as a genre painter. It also announced the type of work that would characterize the major efforts of the artist's career: a large-scale genre scene of "picturesque" and demonstrably American subject matter, set outdoors and combining several vignettes in a well-integrated composition. Johnson followed up his 1859 success two years later with the exhibition of Husking of 1860 (Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York), updating a familiar theme of country custom with sophisticated technique and composition, as well as the dignified and sympathetic rendering of rural types (see P. Hills, Eastman Johnson, New York, 1972, pp. 40-41).
Both Negro Life at the South and Husking won Johnson nearly universal acclaim, but both paintings were relatively small by New York exhibition standards. By 1861, Johnson could not have remained unaware of the enormous canvases--or the enormous prices gained from them--by such American landscape artists as Frederic Church. If he was to satisfy his desire for both acclaim and "wealth," then Johnson would indeed, as he declared to John F. Coyle, need to "do something more considerable," and paint a few "larger and more pretentious pictures." Accordingly, after the exhibition of Husking in 1861, Johnson set off in two directions to gather material: in the summers he followed Union troops into the northern Virginia theater of the Civil War; in the early springs, he travelled to Maine, where he observed the maple sugar gatherings near his childhood home of Fryeburg.
"In Maine of Old," wrote Henry Tuckerman in 1867, "no rustic festival equalled in merriment and local interest the 'boiling day' in the sugar camp." (Book of the Artists, New York, p. 471) In the warm days of later winter and early spring, maple trees were tapped and fitted with a spout, and the sap left to run into a bucket. The filled buckets were collected and delivered to a central camp, where the sap was boiled down to syrup in large iron cauldrons. The boiling process required constant stirring, and a cauldron was never left unattended. Families and neighbors often joined to share the labor; given the episodic nature of the chore and the sweetness of its goal, it is hardly surprising that these congregations would tend to pleasure as well as business, as one writer described in 1847:
The grand wind-up of all, the real frolic of the business, is
when the boiling is nearly completed and the sap begins to
chrystalize [sic]. This, in maple country parlance, is called
"sugaring off."...The boys and girls of the neighborhood are
always ready to assist at the sugaring off...[but] there is much
more laughing than labor on the part of the visitors (John Inman, "Sugaring Off," quoted in D.J. Strazdes, American Paintings
and Sculpture to 1945 in the Carnegie Museum of Art, New York, 1992, p. ________.
Over the course of his visits to the maple sugar camps Johnson made sketches that show nearly every aspect of the sugaring process. The artist reportedly "had a house built on wheels and provided with a stove, so he was able to move his temporary studio and work in comfort, and in this way make accurate and careful studies." (Catalogue of the Finished Pictures, Studies, and Drawings by the Late Eastman Johnson, N.A., New York, 1907, no. 151). Johnson painted boys gathering sap, young men pulling sleds loaded with barrels, older men stirring syrup in large cauldrons, various figures tasting the sugar in groups or by themselves. But like the 1847 writer, he agreed that "the grand wind-up of all" was the sugaring off. This event enabled him to group various incidents and figures in a composite evocation of a particular American ritual. It also provided the best opportunity to suggest "more laughing than labor," or as he put it, an "entirely social...even jolly" occasion that resounded with his childhood memories. Indeed, the reverse of one of Johnson's smaller sketches for a final composition (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano and Madrid) is inscribed: "Maine Turning Off/The hilarious occasion [sic]/Maple sugar making."
Johnson's maple-sugaring sketches were never shown publicly during his lifetime; had the artist completed an exhibition-worthy sugaring picture, it would probably have been finished to the level of his 1860 Husking. Yet twentieth-century eyes, accustomed to French Impressionism and the aesthetics of the sketch, find much to admire in the sheer painterly beauty of a study such as The Party in the Maple Sugar Camp. This is not unwarranted, since Johnson seems to have taken the maple sugaring project as an opportunity to employ the painting methods he had observed in the Paris studio of Thomas Couture; Couture was also the teacher of Edouard Manet. While the assembly of separate studies into a large composition was standard fare for any academically-trained history painter, Couture's method emphasized the role of the painted sketch, and encouraged spontaneity, even in the construction of "finished" works (see S. Mills, in The Cranberry Harvest, pp. 56-58). The freely brushed strokes of color in The Party in the Maple Sugar Camp serve as annotations of form, position and light, but they also suggest the raw foundations that Johnson might, at some earlier stage, have chosen to refine into a finished work. The size of the canvas, the dry impasto brushed across the central foreground and the treatment of the central female dancer, whose dress and face seem in the process of becoming, are indications that Johnson once may have considered more for this painting than a simple exercise in composition and color placement. Ultimately, however, he threw his energies behind the larger, more panoramic and "pretentious" canvas (figure a).
William Walton, Johnson's first biographer, wrote in 1906 that the artist "hoped someday to carry [a Sugaring Off picture] to completion as his masterpiece, and on one or two occasions made definite attempts to secure the commission from some wealthy patron of the arts" ("Eastman Johnson, Painter," Scribner's Magazine, vol. 40, no. 3, September 1906, p. 207). For whatever reasons, that commission never arrived, and Johnson chose not to finish the painting for himself. One can easily imagine that this projected scene of rustic innocence, a celebration of communal labor and rural festivity, would have seemed out of place in the solemn years following the Civil War. In light of Johnson's visits to the warfront, as well as the standard for genre as history painting set by Winslow Homer in 1866 with the exhibition of Prisoners from the Front (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), it is not surprising that Johnson would have laid aside his "Down-east Sugaring" project. Eventually his paintings of Corn Husking of 1876 (Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois) and The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket of 1880 (Timken Art Gallery, San Diego, California) seem to have fulfilled his desire for a large, multi-figured, outdoor genre painting of a demonstrably American subject.
Today, Johnson's oil sketches and compositional studies of a sugaring-off festival remain as testimony to the ambitions of mid-nineteenth century America's foremost genre painter. Providing evidence of the artist's working methods and artistic decision-making, many of the sketches also demonstrate the artist's considerable accomplishment. The Party at the Maple Sugar Camp is among the most beautiful of these works.
Christie's is grateful to Sally Mills for contributing this catalogue essay.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work being compiled by Dr. Patricia Hills.
I am getting on well enough so far as commissions and plenty to
do goes, but getting wealth is a hard matter, and will take
bigger prices than I have been getting...I hope in the next year
to do something more considerable than I have yet done, to paint
two or three larger and more pretentious pictures... In
furtherance of one of these I am about starting for the country
to make studies for a month or six weeks. This will be my fourth annual trip for the same purpose to the wilds of the State of
Maine--The scene is a Down-east Sugaring, a picturesque and
to me very interesting one, partly perhaps on account of its
being associated with my pleasantest early recollections...
There will be forty figures or more, the occasion an entirely
social one, even jolly, and very well adapted as I think to
exhibit character and picturesque combination of form color &c.
At all events I am very much interested in the subject, have
spent a good deal of time on it already and not yet begun the
picture nor indeed got nearly all the materials. But this spring will do me, I hope, in that respect. (13 March 1864; quoted in
M. Simpson, S. Mills and P. Hills, Eastman Johnson: The
Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, San Diego, California, 1990, p. 54)
Johnson eventually spent one more season in Maine collecting "materials" for this projected opus. He never realized a final painting of a "Down-east Sugaring," but some thirty oil sketches, compositional studies and small finished paintings related to the project are know today. The largest of these, measuring ninety-six inches in length and inscribed "unfinished," seems to be "the picture" that Johnson was beginning to imagine but had not yet started painting in early 1864 (figure a).
Five oil studies are so closely related to this large canvas that they can safely be said to show Johnson working out his final composition. The Party in the Maple Sugar Camp, at thirty by forty inches, is the largest of the five, the smallest is only seven by fifteen inches (former collection of Herbert Plimpton). All five works share a compositional anchor on the left of two men in conversation, seated by a large woodpile upon which musicians are playing. Between the musicians and the shed to their right, in front of which a man tends a large black cauldron, appears the area that evidently gave Johnson difficulty: this region displays the most variations of incident and focus among the sketches. In The Party in the Maple Sugar Camp, Johnson closed up this area, tightening his arrangement of vignettes. Clustering figures in the lower left quadrant of a relatively square canvas rather than spreading them frieze-like across a long expanse, the effect is one of focus and release. Of all the compositional studies for Johnson's "Down-east Sugaring" picture, Party in the Maple Sugar Camp offers the most jubilant concentration on the "entirely social" aspects of the maple sugaring process.
In 1861, the year Johnson began his maple-sugaring project, the thirty-seven-year-old artist was both eager and well positioned to undertake a monumental genre painting. He had spent a long and eclectic apprenticeship in Europe, working from 1849 to 1855 in Düsseldorf, the Hague and Paris. Johnson received encouragement for this study from the American Art-Union, a promoter of American art in general and genre art in particular, and he used his six years abroad to enlarge his repertoire of subjects by venturing narrative and anecdotal themes. Upon his return to the United States in 1855, Johnson settled in Washington, DC and began to investigate the possibilities for paintings of decidedly American subject matter. In 1856 and 1857 he visited northern Wisconsin, where he made studies of the Chippewa Indians living at Grand Portage; back in Washington he painted Mount Vernon from the window of his father's house on F Street, he found the subject for his first major American work Negro Life at the South, later known as Old Kentucky Home--Life in the South of 1859 (The New-York Historical Society, New York on permanent loan from the New York Public Library, New York).
Exhibited in 1859 in New York, where Johnson had moved the previous year, this painting of black slaves courting, relaxing and enjoying music in the back yard of their dilapidated quarters established Johnson's reputation as a genre painter. It also announced the type of work that would characterize the major efforts of the artist's career: a large-scale genre scene of "picturesque" and demonstrably American subject matter, set outdoors and combining several vignettes in a well-integrated composition. Johnson followed up his 1859 success two years later with the exhibition of Husking of 1860 (Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York), updating a familiar theme of country custom with sophisticated technique and composition, as well as the dignified and sympathetic rendering of rural types (see P. Hills, Eastman Johnson, New York, 1972, pp. 40-41).
Both Negro Life at the South and Husking won Johnson nearly universal acclaim, but both paintings were relatively small by New York exhibition standards. By 1861, Johnson could not have remained unaware of the enormous canvases--or the enormous prices gained from them--by such American landscape artists as Frederic Church. If he was to satisfy his desire for both acclaim and "wealth," then Johnson would indeed, as he declared to John F. Coyle, need to "do something more considerable," and paint a few "larger and more pretentious pictures." Accordingly, after the exhibition of Husking in 1861, Johnson set off in two directions to gather material: in the summers he followed Union troops into the northern Virginia theater of the Civil War; in the early springs, he travelled to Maine, where he observed the maple sugar gatherings near his childhood home of Fryeburg.
"In Maine of Old," wrote Henry Tuckerman in 1867, "no rustic festival equalled in merriment and local interest the 'boiling day' in the sugar camp." (Book of the Artists, New York, p. 471) In the warm days of later winter and early spring, maple trees were tapped and fitted with a spout, and the sap left to run into a bucket. The filled buckets were collected and delivered to a central camp, where the sap was boiled down to syrup in large iron cauldrons. The boiling process required constant stirring, and a cauldron was never left unattended. Families and neighbors often joined to share the labor; given the episodic nature of the chore and the sweetness of its goal, it is hardly surprising that these congregations would tend to pleasure as well as business, as one writer described in 1847:
The grand wind-up of all, the real frolic of the business, is
when the boiling is nearly completed and the sap begins to
chrystalize [sic]. This, in maple country parlance, is called
"sugaring off."...The boys and girls of the neighborhood are
always ready to assist at the sugaring off...[but] there is much
more laughing than labor on the part of the visitors (John Inman, "Sugaring Off," quoted in D.J. Strazdes, American Paintings
and Sculpture to 1945 in the Carnegie Museum of Art, New York, 1992, p. ________.
Over the course of his visits to the maple sugar camps Johnson made sketches that show nearly every aspect of the sugaring process. The artist reportedly "had a house built on wheels and provided with a stove, so he was able to move his temporary studio and work in comfort, and in this way make accurate and careful studies." (Catalogue of the Finished Pictures, Studies, and Drawings by the Late Eastman Johnson, N.A., New York, 1907, no. 151). Johnson painted boys gathering sap, young men pulling sleds loaded with barrels, older men stirring syrup in large cauldrons, various figures tasting the sugar in groups or by themselves. But like the 1847 writer, he agreed that "the grand wind-up of all" was the sugaring off. This event enabled him to group various incidents and figures in a composite evocation of a particular American ritual. It also provided the best opportunity to suggest "more laughing than labor," or as he put it, an "entirely social...even jolly" occasion that resounded with his childhood memories. Indeed, the reverse of one of Johnson's smaller sketches for a final composition (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano and Madrid) is inscribed: "Maine Turning Off/The hilarious occasion [sic]/Maple sugar making."
Johnson's maple-sugaring sketches were never shown publicly during his lifetime; had the artist completed an exhibition-worthy sugaring picture, it would probably have been finished to the level of his 1860 Husking. Yet twentieth-century eyes, accustomed to French Impressionism and the aesthetics of the sketch, find much to admire in the sheer painterly beauty of a study such as The Party in the Maple Sugar Camp. This is not unwarranted, since Johnson seems to have taken the maple sugaring project as an opportunity to employ the painting methods he had observed in the Paris studio of Thomas Couture; Couture was also the teacher of Edouard Manet. While the assembly of separate studies into a large composition was standard fare for any academically-trained history painter, Couture's method emphasized the role of the painted sketch, and encouraged spontaneity, even in the construction of "finished" works (see S. Mills, in The Cranberry Harvest, pp. 56-58). The freely brushed strokes of color in The Party in the Maple Sugar Camp serve as annotations of form, position and light, but they also suggest the raw foundations that Johnson might, at some earlier stage, have chosen to refine into a finished work. The size of the canvas, the dry impasto brushed across the central foreground and the treatment of the central female dancer, whose dress and face seem in the process of becoming, are indications that Johnson once may have considered more for this painting than a simple exercise in composition and color placement. Ultimately, however, he threw his energies behind the larger, more panoramic and "pretentious" canvas (figure a).
William Walton, Johnson's first biographer, wrote in 1906 that the artist "hoped someday to carry [a Sugaring Off picture] to completion as his masterpiece, and on one or two occasions made definite attempts to secure the commission from some wealthy patron of the arts" ("Eastman Johnson, Painter," Scribner's Magazine, vol. 40, no. 3, September 1906, p. 207). For whatever reasons, that commission never arrived, and Johnson chose not to finish the painting for himself. One can easily imagine that this projected scene of rustic innocence, a celebration of communal labor and rural festivity, would have seemed out of place in the solemn years following the Civil War. In light of Johnson's visits to the warfront, as well as the standard for genre as history painting set by Winslow Homer in 1866 with the exhibition of Prisoners from the Front (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), it is not surprising that Johnson would have laid aside his "Down-east Sugaring" project. Eventually his paintings of Corn Husking of 1876 (Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois) and The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket of 1880 (Timken Art Gallery, San Diego, California) seem to have fulfilled his desire for a large, multi-figured, outdoor genre painting of a demonstrably American subject.
Today, Johnson's oil sketches and compositional studies of a sugaring-off festival remain as testimony to the ambitions of mid-nineteenth century America's foremost genre painter. Providing evidence of the artist's working methods and artistic decision-making, many of the sketches also demonstrate the artist's considerable accomplishment. The Party at the Maple Sugar Camp is among the most beautiful of these works.
Christie's is grateful to Sally Mills for contributing this catalogue essay.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work being compiled by Dr. Patricia Hills.