English: Like a number of his fellow genre painters, the Boston artist Eastman Johnson trained abroad in Düsseldorf and later at The Hague, where he became familiar with Dutch 17th-century art. Between 1870 and 1887, Johnson spent the summer and autumn months working in Nantucket. In this work, his last dated genre painting, a number of elderly men, seated around a stove in a cobbler's shop, reminisce about the past. Two years after the picture was completed, Johnson identified the philosophers: Captain Haggerty, the shoemaker; Captain Moore, the talker; and, on the left-hand side leaning on his hand, Captain Ray. The other captains, he noted, were already dead.