Cleveland Museum of Art

Winding Yarn (Interior of a Nantucket Kitchen)

Eastman Johnson

Date

1872

Medium

oil on board

Culture

America

Department

American Painting and Sculpture

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

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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