Cleveland Museum of Art
Winding Yarn (Interior of a Nantucket Kitchen)
Eastman JohnsonLinkedCulture matchlcp-a0af19443c20
- Date
- 1872
- Medium
- oil on board
- Culture
- America
- Department
- American Painting and Sculpture
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 173167
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
Set in a rustic kitchen on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, this painting depicts a woman who winds a ball of yarn from a coil looped in the hands of a man sitting across from her at a respectable distance. At the time, winding yarn was a common symbol of courtship that carried humorous overtones of a woman ensnaring her suitor. The second woman in the composition is likely a chaperone. The suitor’s unrefined, open-legged pose, coupled with his rude action of placing his hat on the floor, adds further comic elements that contemporary audiences would have appreciated. Eastman Johnson was a cofounder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection
- Provenance
- H. B. Hurlbut, Cleveland (1878).
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