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The Scissors Grinder
The Scissors Grinder
Artist (1824 - 1906)

The Scissors Grinder

Date1870
DimensionsSight: 25 × 21 in. (63.5 × 53.3 cm)
Object numberN0424.1955
Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Gift of Stephen C. Clark
Photograph by Richard Walker
Label TextStephen Clark purchased this painting from MacBeth Gallery just months prior to The Farmers’ Museum opening to the public. In its early years, the museum focused on the works of craftsmen and tradespeople who populated the villages and traveled the countryside in 19th-century America. Today, craftspeople still ply trades like weaving at The Farmers’ Museum. Eastman Johnson is best remembered today for his skill as a genre painter. Johnson began as a successful portrait painter, capturing images of Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, but in 1858 turned to American genre themes such as African Americans, Native Americans, politics, and the frontier. Johnson concentrated on themes that recorded and ennobled rural American life before the Industrial Revolution.
BibliographyRichards, Frederick B., Lord, Clifford L. et al., “The Association: Trustees’ Meeting,” in New York History, vol. 24 no.4 (October, 1943), p. 609.

Everett U. Crosby, Eastman Johnson at Nantucket, His Paintings and Sketches of Nantucket People and Scenes (Nantucket Island, MA: Everett U. Crosby, 1944), pp. 19, 62, no. 56, ill.

Carbone, Teresa A., Hills, Patricia et al., Eastman Johnson Painting America (exh. cat. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1999), p. 78.

Packham, Jim, “The Scissors Grinder,” in The Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, vol. 53 no. 2 (June 2000), cover, p. 61, ill.

Conforti, Michael, Ganz, James A. et al., The Clark Brothers Collect Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings (exh. cat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 333, fig. 298, no. 223, ill.
On View
Not on view
The Blacksmith Shop
Eastman Johnson
1863
The Pet Lamb
Eastman Johnson
1873
The Woodcutter
Eastman Johnson
1868
Justice's Court in the Back Woods
Tompkins Harrison Matteson
1850
Seated Girl With Strawberries
Joshua Johnson
1803-1805
Leather Stocking and ---
Felix Octavius Carr Darley
n.d.
The Itinerant Artist
Charles Bird King
c. 1850
Boy in a Rocking Chair
Samuel Miller
1840-1850
Scissors case
Martha Frost Benjamin
1982

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