Footnotes

Provenance
(Probably) Eastman Johnson Estate.
Mrs. Eastman Johnson, New York (by bequest from the previous, 1906).
Albert Rosenthal, New Hope, PA (probably acquired from the previous, 1915).
The Estate of Albert Rosenthal, with Albert Duveen, New York (by 1939).
Albert Duveen, New York, and M. Knoedler & Co., New York (acquired from the previous, February 8, 1946, as Old Woman).
M. Knoedler & Co., New York (acquired from the half share of Albert Duveen, June 27, 1956).
Paul David Magriel, New York (acquired from the previous, February 8, 1963).
E.V. Thaw.
Coe Kerr Gallery, New York (by 1995).
Sometime after to Neal Auction Company, New Orleans, LA, August 3, 2002, lot 232.
The present private collection (probably acquired from the previous).

Exhibited
New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Paintings and Drawings by Eastman Johnson, January 7–26, 1946, no. 41, not illustrated.

New York, M. Knoedler & Co, Paintings and Drawings by Eastman Johnson, January 7–26, 1946, no. 41, as An Old Woman. Traveled to: The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, March 1946 (California Palace 1946).

Literature
Paintings and Drawings by Eastman Johnson (New York: M. Knoedler & Co., 1946), exhibition catalogue, n.p., no. 41, as An Old Woman.

Patricia Hills and Abigael MacGibeny, "Dorothea Lynde Dix, c.1870–81" in Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné, www.eastmanjohnson.org/catalogue/entry.php?id=959 (accessed on June 10, 2025), no. 45.3.3.

N.B.
Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was a nurse and a vocal advocate for the mentally ill. She grew up in Worcester and in Boston, Massachusetts. In her late teens she began teaching at an all-girls school in Worcester and in 1821 she opened her own school in Boston, first catering primarily to upper-class families but later turning to teaching poor and neglected children. Dix was a Unitarian - although she had been raised Catholic and then Congregationalist - and authored numerous devotional books and stories for kids, as well as the botanical book Garland of Flora (1839) which was one of the first published floral dictionaries in the U.S.

After a brief stint working as a governess for Unitarian intellectual William Ellery Channing and running a girls' school in Boston, Dix experienced a decline in mental and physical health that led her to travel to England in 1836. While in England, she became close with a group of British social reformers including Elizabeth Fry, Samuel Tuke, and William Rathbone, the latter of whose family she stayed with while there. This group was particularly invested in reforming mental health care and asylums, a movement called at the time 'lunacy reform'. Dix was greatly inspired by this cause and would pursue prison and asylum reform for the rest of her life.

Upon returning to the U.S. in 1840, Dix began her own investigation of mental illness treatment. While teaching classes to female prisoners in Cambridge, she became appalled at the abysmal state of their cells and at the often abusive, inhumane treatment to which they were subject. This inspired her to travel throughout the northeastern U.S. and beyond, appealing to state legislatures to establish new facilities and legislations for mental health care. Throughout the 1840s she visited over 500 almshouses, 300 county jails, 18 state penitentiaries, and myriad hospitals. She was responsible for the first generation of mental health asylums in New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, as well as hospitals in Scotland, Nova Scotia, Italy, and even Japan. She even met with Pope Pius IX in Rome, who visited asylums at her urging and was similarly appalled by the conditions.

Dix worked as Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union Army from 1861-65. In 1881 she moved into the New Jersey State Hospital that she herself had helped build, and in 1887 she died and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her legacy lives on in the pioneering legislature that she promoted to protect and advocate for the mentally ill, and in the many hospitals and institutions that bear her name, including the Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center in Bangor, Maine, the Dixmont Hospital in Pennsylvania, and the Dix Ward in Mclean Asylum in Belmont, Massachusetts. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1979, holds a place on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail, and had her visage on a 1983 USPS Great Americans series stamp.

The present work has authenticated via in-person examination by Abigael MacGibeny, whom we would like to thank for her kind assistance in cataloguing this lot.