Study for A Glass with the Squire,

ca. 1873–80

Following study in Europe, including three years in The Hague absorbing the color and naturalism of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters, Eastman Johnson settled in New York and launched a successful career in genre painting. His images of rural, regional America were in the tradition of homespun painters like William Sidney Mount, but his painterly sophistication was such that he was called "the American Rembrandt." Beginning about 1870, Johnson summered annually on Nantucket, where he created some of his most ambitious and carefully considered compositions. Preceded by numerous sketches and studies going back as early as 1873, this major preparatory work for <em>A Glass with the Squire</em> of 1880 is fully realized yet also appealingly loose and immediate. A subtle tableau of class distinctions, the work depicts Jim Folsom and retired sea captain Charles Myrick, local Nantucket residents known to Johnson, standing before an arrangement of the artist’s antique furnishings. The humbler Folsom, at left, is set off against the taller and more erect "Squire" Myrick, whose proprietary status is underscored by his slightly more central pictorial placement. Among the last genre paintings Johnson produced before turning full-time to portraiture, the image constructs a world of provincial social types that was fast losing currency in the increasingly complex social fabric of Gilded Age America.