Winding Yarn (Interior of a Nantucket Kitchen) (1872): Art, History and Details

Winding Yarn (Interior of a Nantucket Kitchen) (1872) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Eastman Johnson (American, 1824–1906).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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.

Object facts

• Title: Winding Yarn (Interior of a Nantucket Kitchen)
• Date: 1872
• Creator attribution: Eastman Johnson (American, 1824–1906)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on board
• Dimensions: Framed: 70.2 x 85.4 x 10.2 cm (27 5/8 x 33 5/8 x 4 in.); Unframed: 37.5 x 54.6 cm (14 3/4 x 21 1/2 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1915.682

A detail from the museum

Eastman Johnson was a cofounder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Collection credit

Hinman B. Hurlbut Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Strahan, Edward, ed. The Art Treasures of America: Being the Choicest Works of Art in the Public and Private Collections of North America. vol. 8. Philadelphia: Gebbie & Barrie, 1879.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of the Inaugural Exhibition June 6-September 20, 1916. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1916.
• Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Donald Jeffries Bear, and Janet Hite Lineberger. Painting Today and Yesterday in the United States. June Fifth [to] September First, 1941. Santa Barbara, Calif: [Pacific Coast Pub. Co.], 1941.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.