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T h e "American-Rembrandt" on Nantucket by Robert A. diCurcio NANTUCKET! SAY THE word at a gathering and faces light up, pleasant memories flow, and a mystic aura is evoked. True in the day of whaling as it is now, just as surely did the faraway island cast its spell on one of America's greatest artists: Eastman Johnson, an American "Old Master" if ever there was one. In 1870, as an accomplished and renowned portrait painter and "genre" artist, he brought his new bride, Elizabeth Buckley of Troy, N.Y., to summer on The Island at the suggestion of one Dr. Gaillard Thomas to "...meet his desire for a quiet and incurious locality". Nantucket became Eastman Johnson's summer studio ever after, for he — like so many others to follow him — succumbed to that happy malady: falling in love with Nantucket Island. His residence and studio perched atop "the Cliff' looking out over cranberry bogs that in those days ringed the broad, watery expanse of Nantucket Sound below. Here he was to immortalize the 19th century Nantucketers who culled those cranberry bogs dressed in stove pipe hats or full skirts with fancy bonnets — a remarkable series of genre pictures of those elegant and distinguished rustics, the Nantucket cranberry pickers. In 1873, Scribner's Monthly published an article on Johnson, reading in part:". . .the artist Eastman Johnson has shown his usual fine taste in taking up his residence here and has transformed two of the old houses that stood on the site into a home and studio. The location is just out of town on the Cliff which is high ground just above the bathing beach, commanding a magnificent sweep of the ocean, a spot which ought to be occupied by cottages and hotels!" Eastman Johnson's reputation in the latter half of the 19th century stemmed mainly from his popularly acclaimed genre paintings — pictures of the dignity in the every day life and labors of common people. After 1870, Nantucket became the principal locale for his genre paintings of the American scene. Previously, as a sometime Washington, D.C. resident, he had painted negro slave scenes; his famous Negro Life in the South 1859 (The New York Historical Society) — or My Old Kentucky Home as it later came to be called after Stephen Foster's popular song of the same name — earned him the respect of the public, the prestigious National Academy of Design, and the art critics of the day, one of whom called it "A first class character piece". Although some today would
