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Sugaring Off: The Maple Sugar Paintings of Eastman Johnson
This lovely book provides the first comprehensive examination of Eastman Johnson's vivid paintings of a quintessential New England theme - the making of maple sugar. This series of pictures, executed during the 1860s, is perhaps the most ambitious project in the artist's career. Brian Allen discusses the ways in which Johnson's maple sugar paintings reflect a New England on the edge of vast changes, both in the technology of farming and in the social structures of small communities. He notes how Johnson conveys the tense, shifting relationship that existed between industrial innovation and New England's distinctive brand of community spirit, evident through maple sugar's close association with free labour, as opposed to cane sugar's connection with slavery. Presented here in full colour, Johnson's maple sugar paintings are both a celebration of New England and a commentary on a bygone era. This book is the catalogue for an exhibition organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (January 18 to April 18, 2004), and traveling to The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California (May 11 to August 1, 2004).
56 pages, Paperback
First published January 11, 2004
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December 28, 2019
This is an extremely interesting and well-written exhibition catalog centered on the artist Eastman Johnson's series of paintings and oil sketches about a 19th Century New England custom - having a party, or "sugaring off" (as in bake-off) to celebrate the completion of the process of gathering sap from maple trees, and boiling it down into maple sugar, which was a key commodity in New England at one point.
The author supplies some very interesting themes in the text, including information on the artist's pro-abolitionist beliefs, and how Civil War era politics may have subtly informed the series of works. Sugar cane was the key crop that drove the importation of slaves into the New World - especially into the Caribbean. Cane sugar therefore was a product of cruelty and exploitation, the product of tears and blood - whereas maple sugar was a community endeavor by joyful free people. In fact, the maple sugar making technology Johnson depicts in his paintings was already out of date by the time he produced these paintings. It represents an earlier era, when pails were still made of wood (as opposed to metal) and maple tapping spouts were just shingles. The earlier era is therefore romanticized as an ideal era of community equality, and effort. This is in stark contrast to the forced labor and industrial prison-agriculture of sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean and Louisiana - he seems to be saying that in the North, men and women freely work tapping sap in a common woods, whereas in the South, farm labor is cruelly exploited, and the mass production of cane sugar is possible only because of the price paid in slaves' tears and blood. Therefore, the paintings may be seen to have a rather subtle political subtext. Johnson was unable to find a buyer & never finished his biggest version of "Sugaring Off" - the author thinks that may have been because the era had moved on by the time he got to the large canvas, and it may not have won the approval of wealthy patrons who would buy his works. The many figures clumped in the painting may not have been seen as up to date by the time he had started the large canvas. Perhaps in 1865 when he completed the preliminary canvas, the message was slightly out of date, since the Civil War ended in April of 1865 - followed by the tragic Lincoln assassination. In any event, he was unable to find a buyer to finance the completion of the work. However, it still stands as an impressive and mysterious painting - showing the celebration in the snow streaked maple tree forest, which various groups relaxing, flirting, gossiping, etc., as the sugar tender stirs the vast cauldron of boiling sap - reducing it little by little to the brown maple sugar the community relied on to make it through the year.
Here are some quotes from the catalog:
"Pioneered by Native Americans, maple sugaring had by the middle of the nineteenth century become a badge of New England identity that reflected Yankee ingenuity and independence."
"In 1856 and again in 1857, [Johnson] ... traveled to Superior, Wisconsin, and north toward the Canadian border, where he drew an amazing series of pencil portraits of members of the Anishinabe tribe..."
"...the maple sugar paintings are amazing works, sloppy and elemental yet painstakingly exact in their depictions of sugaring technology."
"...they reflect the significant social and technological upheaval of the time and reinforce the ideals of free labor during the tumult of the Civil War."
"While [Johnson's] ... depiction of sugar making is exact, it illustrates a method that was outdated. Moreover, though 1860 was maple sugar's peak year, with some 40 million pounds produced, the massive deforestation of maple forests in New England was well underway. In deep woods, sugar maples rose tall and straight, producing clear trunks without side branches, which were as perfect for the sugar maker as they were for loggers. By mid-century, roughly three-quarters of Vermont was deforested and cultivated, with wood used either for lumber or for potash, which was converted later to soap, gunpowder, glass, fertilizer, or bleach."
"...by 1850 almost 245,000 slaves worked in [Louisiana's] cane sugar industry."
"Quakers, and later, a range of New Englanders deemed maple sugar "innocent" precisely because it was not "sprinkled with the tears and blood of slaves" but rather "made by those who are happy and free."
"...Johnson...could understand [maple sugaring] ... as a metaphor both for renewal and regeneration and for the larger themes implicated in the establishment of the American nation."
"Johnson likely hoped to reference maple sugar making to the larger issues of the Civil War. The artist was a strong supporter of the Union cause, a Republican connected by family and friendship to prominent Whig and, later, Republican politicians, and by patronage to the entrepreneurial class in New York and Boston that backed Lincoln and the war effort."
"Johnson's [maple sugar] kettle tender is independent, industrious, self-reliant, self-made, and rugged, eschewing modern vanities and carnal attractions, an American hero..."
"Johnson, working on the sugar scenes throughout the Civil War, likely intended a political polemic with a set of patriotic values in mind."
"By the end of the 1860s, African American subject matter was disappearing from American genre painting as the complexities of Reconstruction gradually sapped the spirit of idealism that had driven movements to free and then integrate blacks into American economic, social, and political life."
"...by the 1860s maple sugar was rarely used in urban, northeastern America, which overwhelmingly preferred can sugar, regardless of its source of production, for its whiteness, finer granulation, lighter taste, easier storage, and longer lifespan."
"...sugaring lacked the tourist cachet and accompanying anecdotal hooks of, for instance, Johnson's later Nantucket paintings, which were produced during the island's early boom as a vacation resort, or Winslow Homer's Adirondack paintings from the late 1860s."
"...Johnson's efforts to push a patriotic, unifying message through the maple sugar series might have conflicted with his own knowledge and understanding of the impending downfall of sugaring and sugarers."
"...his domestic interiors ... have been correctly interpreted as commending such values as respect for tradition, hierarchy, hard work, modesty, restraint in personal comportment, and civic duty."
"A wartime audience might have wanted a stirring assertion of patriotic values. A postwar audience preferred something closer to tension-free nostalgia. Johnson's sugar scenes straddled both eras, dealing with the cryptic subject of sugaring, and thus might not have satisfied either desire."
The author supplies some very interesting themes in the text, including information on the artist's pro-abolitionist beliefs, and how Civil War era politics may have subtly informed the series of works. Sugar cane was the key crop that drove the importation of slaves into the New World - especially into the Caribbean. Cane sugar therefore was a product of cruelty and exploitation, the product of tears and blood - whereas maple sugar was a community endeavor by joyful free people. In fact, the maple sugar making technology Johnson depicts in his paintings was already out of date by the time he produced these paintings. It represents an earlier era, when pails were still made of wood (as opposed to metal) and maple tapping spouts were just shingles. The earlier era is therefore romanticized as an ideal era of community equality, and effort. This is in stark contrast to the forced labor and industrial prison-agriculture of sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean and Louisiana - he seems to be saying that in the North, men and women freely work tapping sap in a common woods, whereas in the South, farm labor is cruelly exploited, and the mass production of cane sugar is possible only because of the price paid in slaves' tears and blood. Therefore, the paintings may be seen to have a rather subtle political subtext. Johnson was unable to find a buyer & never finished his biggest version of "Sugaring Off" - the author thinks that may have been because the era had moved on by the time he got to the large canvas, and it may not have won the approval of wealthy patrons who would buy his works. The many figures clumped in the painting may not have been seen as up to date by the time he had started the large canvas. Perhaps in 1865 when he completed the preliminary canvas, the message was slightly out of date, since the Civil War ended in April of 1865 - followed by the tragic Lincoln assassination. In any event, he was unable to find a buyer to finance the completion of the work. However, it still stands as an impressive and mysterious painting - showing the celebration in the snow streaked maple tree forest, which various groups relaxing, flirting, gossiping, etc., as the sugar tender stirs the vast cauldron of boiling sap - reducing it little by little to the brown maple sugar the community relied on to make it through the year.
Here are some quotes from the catalog:
"Pioneered by Native Americans, maple sugaring had by the middle of the nineteenth century become a badge of New England identity that reflected Yankee ingenuity and independence."
"In 1856 and again in 1857, [Johnson] ... traveled to Superior, Wisconsin, and north toward the Canadian border, where he drew an amazing series of pencil portraits of members of the Anishinabe tribe..."
"...the maple sugar paintings are amazing works, sloppy and elemental yet painstakingly exact in their depictions of sugaring technology."
"...they reflect the significant social and technological upheaval of the time and reinforce the ideals of free labor during the tumult of the Civil War."
"While [Johnson's] ... depiction of sugar making is exact, it illustrates a method that was outdated. Moreover, though 1860 was maple sugar's peak year, with some 40 million pounds produced, the massive deforestation of maple forests in New England was well underway. In deep woods, sugar maples rose tall and straight, producing clear trunks without side branches, which were as perfect for the sugar maker as they were for loggers. By mid-century, roughly three-quarters of Vermont was deforested and cultivated, with wood used either for lumber or for potash, which was converted later to soap, gunpowder, glass, fertilizer, or bleach."
"...by 1850 almost 245,000 slaves worked in [Louisiana's] cane sugar industry."
"Quakers, and later, a range of New Englanders deemed maple sugar "innocent" precisely because it was not "sprinkled with the tears and blood of slaves" but rather "made by those who are happy and free."
"...Johnson...could understand [maple sugaring] ... as a metaphor both for renewal and regeneration and for the larger themes implicated in the establishment of the American nation."
"Johnson likely hoped to reference maple sugar making to the larger issues of the Civil War. The artist was a strong supporter of the Union cause, a Republican connected by family and friendship to prominent Whig and, later, Republican politicians, and by patronage to the entrepreneurial class in New York and Boston that backed Lincoln and the war effort."
"Johnson's [maple sugar] kettle tender is independent, industrious, self-reliant, self-made, and rugged, eschewing modern vanities and carnal attractions, an American hero..."
"Johnson, working on the sugar scenes throughout the Civil War, likely intended a political polemic with a set of patriotic values in mind."
"By the end of the 1860s, African American subject matter was disappearing from American genre painting as the complexities of Reconstruction gradually sapped the spirit of idealism that had driven movements to free and then integrate blacks into American economic, social, and political life."
"...by the 1860s maple sugar was rarely used in urban, northeastern America, which overwhelmingly preferred can sugar, regardless of its source of production, for its whiteness, finer granulation, lighter taste, easier storage, and longer lifespan."
"...sugaring lacked the tourist cachet and accompanying anecdotal hooks of, for instance, Johnson's later Nantucket paintings, which were produced during the island's early boom as a vacation resort, or Winslow Homer's Adirondack paintings from the late 1860s."
"...Johnson's efforts to push a patriotic, unifying message through the maple sugar series might have conflicted with his own knowledge and understanding of the impending downfall of sugaring and sugarers."
"...his domestic interiors ... have been correctly interpreted as commending such values as respect for tradition, hierarchy, hard work, modesty, restraint in personal comportment, and civic duty."
"A wartime audience might have wanted a stirring assertion of patriotic values. A postwar audience preferred something closer to tension-free nostalgia. Johnson's sugar scenes straddled both eras, dealing with the cryptic subject of sugaring, and thus might not have satisfied either desire."
June 15, 2016
This is a quick read, about 2-3 hours tops. The book accompanied an exhibition of the important American painter Eastman Johnson's genre work on maple sugar harvesting. One thing that the book accomplishes is making the reader wish that I had seen the original museum show!
The text is interesting and goes a bit into the history of maple sugaring in the Northeast and the cultural significance of this. In addition, he discusses in detail the 25 paintings that comprised the exhibition.
I would have rated the book higher but for two things. . . First, the reproductions of the paintings are generally too small to see the detail that the author is discussing. These paintings have a lot of action going on in them, and it is hard to see that complexity with the generally small sized reproductions. Second, I wanted to read more about the life of Eastman Johnson; this book contains just a few biographical details. It really does concentrate on these 25 paintings (with a few exceptions) and the limited aspect of Johnson's career for which these paintings were done. So don't turn to this book if it is your introduction to Johnson's oeuvre.
The text is interesting and goes a bit into the history of maple sugaring in the Northeast and the cultural significance of this. In addition, he discusses in detail the 25 paintings that comprised the exhibition.
I would have rated the book higher but for two things. . . First, the reproductions of the paintings are generally too small to see the detail that the author is discussing. These paintings have a lot of action going on in them, and it is hard to see that complexity with the generally small sized reproductions. Second, I wanted to read more about the life of Eastman Johnson; this book contains just a few biographical details. It really does concentrate on these 25 paintings (with a few exceptions) and the limited aspect of Johnson's career for which these paintings were done. So don't turn to this book if it is your introduction to Johnson's oeuvre.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews