Sweetly unsatisfying

“Sugaring Off: The Maple Sugar Paintings of Eastman Johnson” has the curious distinction of being a comprehensive exhibition about an unfinished project. Now on view in the Boone Gallery at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, it is an earnest but somewhat lopsided affair -- more context than substance -- that leaves one feeling well informed but artistically unsatiated, despite the delicious title.

The project, which Eastman pursued from 1861 to about 1865, was a series of paintings devoted to the annual maple sugar harvest of the American Northeast. He documented various facets of the tradition on winter expeditions through his home state of Maine, producing about two-dozen studies.

The culmination was to be a monumental portrayal of the post-harvest celebration known as the “sugaring off,” wherein farmers and townspeople gathered to partake of hot maple syrup poured over snow, among other seasonal treats. Failing to find a patron, however, Eastman eventually abandoned the project and left most of the works to languish in his studio until his death in 1906.

At the time that he began the series, Eastman had recently established his reputation in New York with “Negro Life at the South” (1859) and other sentimental genre depictions of African American subjects. He took a similar tack here, presenting rural New Englanders as a distinct regional type composed of various stock characters and emblematic of particular values.

In this context, the tradition of sugaring became an archetypal expression of Yankee identity, the embodiment of honesty, ingenuity, industry, community-mindedness and other of its presumed virtues.

On another level -- one that could hardly have gone unnoticed during the Civil War years -- the tradition of maple sugaring stood in contrast to the production of cane sugar, which depended on slave labor. Although not explicit in the work, Johnson’s position on the subject seems to have been in line with that of abolitionist Benjamin Rush, who wrote as early as 1792: “I cannot help contemplating a maple sugar tree without a species of veneration, for I behold in it a happy means of rendering commerce and slavery of African brethren in sugar islands as unnecessary.”

Brian T. Allen, who organized the show for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts and who wrote its catalog (from which the Rush quote is taken), stops short of ascribing a specifically political intention to the work but makes a strong case for placing it in a framework of liberal idealism, one informed by Puritan values and deeply concerned with the unity and well-being of the nation.

“It is probable that Johnson saw his maple sugar project as a polemic insofar as it dealt with the themes of rebirth and regeneration through toil and turmoil,” he writes. “The sugar-making process as Johnson shows it clearly involves nature’s cyclical changes, long and lonely commitment, and the transformation through labor and fire of sap, an otherwise useless fluid, into something sweet, delicious, and nurturing, something that nourished farm families for the rest of the year.”

As this passage might suggest, the exhibition bears more than a passing resemblance to a graduate school thesis. (In his acknowledgments, Allen does indeed refer to a Yale professor whose class apparently inspired the development of the concept.)

Rather than bogging things down, however, the academic slant emerges as one of the show’s foremost attributes. In fleshing out the aesthetic and sociopolitical intricacies of a generally overlooked body of work -- while managing to keep his language clear and accessible -- Allen brings a sense of relevance to what might otherwise have been a very sleepy presentation.

There are 16 paintings in all. The centerpiece is an unfinished 4-by-8-foot canvas that was probably intended to be the culminating work, portraying several dozen revelers scattered around a blazing caldron in a clearing in the woods.

Smaller studies reveal Johnson experimenting with this panoramic composition, as well as with the portrayal of specific figures.

The kettle tender and a certain red-shirted dandy appear in multiple configurations, suggesting significant symbolic importance. (In Allen’s interpretation, the former stands for hard work, rugged individualism and tradition; the latter, leisure, urbanization, the future.) A black fiddler sits at the top point of most group compositions; a blushing romance pops up here and there; and children -- the main “sap gatherers” -- scatter throughout.

The principal charm of these loose, sketchy paintings lies in their often enchanting atmospherics. The bonfires emit a vivid orange glow; wintry shades of blue and lavender mingle with yellow smoke amid the skeletal tree branches; and a mysterious, loamy red filters through several entire compositions.

On the whole, however, the works will strike most contemporary viewers as less than riveting.

Already nostalgic at the time of their creation, these idyllic scenes feel hopelessly removed from our world yet not especially exotic. The cold and rather bland milieu leaves one longing for the plush, bourgeois drawing rooms of the artist’s subsequent work; its humble stock figures are a poor substitute for the richly rendered aristocratic subjects who populate later portraits.

In contemplating the ultimate failure of the series, Allen suggests that Johnson -- typically an astute judge of the public’s taste for sentiment -- may have simply overstepped.

“Johnson’s efforts to push a patriotic, unifying message through the maple sugar series,” Allen writes, “might have conflicted with his own knowledge and understanding of the impending downfall of sugaring and sugarers. A false note might have been sounded in what Johnson otherwise intended as a smoothly reassuring paean to old values.”

The same might be said of countless films languishing on the shelves of video stores, or television programs shuffled off to the nether regions of late-night cable. As any entertainment executive knows, the public is a fickle beast, and one is bound to miss the mark occasionally. The merit of the Johnson show lies in its casting of the maple sugar series as not simply an overlooked chapter in an otherwise successful career but as an interesting failure, poignant in its aspirations and revealing in its shortcomings.

*

‘Sugaring Off:

The Maple Sugar Paintings of Eastman Johnson’

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Where: The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino

Ends: Aug. 1

Price: $12.50; over 65, $10; students 12-18, $8.50; ages 5-11, $5; under 5, free.

Contact: (626) 405-2100