Eastman Johnson

American, 1824 - 1906

BiographyEastman Johnson was an American genre and portrait painter whose career spanned the second half of the nineteenth century. Born in 1824 in Lovell, Maine, Johnson learned to draw in high school and showed early promise as a draftsman. Following a short period in Boston, where he trained in a lithographer’s shop, Johnson turned his skills to portraiture and started his artistic career by traveling through Maine sketching his friends and family. By 1844 or 1845, Johnson moved to Washington, D.C., and steadily built a reputation for himself. His father Philip C. Johnson, a government official in Maine, was able to facilitate his introduction to members of Congress, which in turn led to portrait commissions from leading families in the capital city. After a return to New England (to sketch Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his circle of American poets), Johnson embarked for Europe in 1849 with the intention of expanding beyond portraiture and learning how to master figure drawing and genre composition.

Between 1849 and 1855, Johnson lived and traveled throughout Europe. He began his training at the Royal Academy in Düsseldorf, Germany, considered one of the preeminent schools for the study of genre painting, before entering the studio of German-born American history painter Emanuel Leutze to paint under his direction. Johnson spent the winter of 1851-52 in The Hague, to study firsthand the Dutch masters (in particular Van Dyck and Rembrandt); and in the summer of 1855 he moved to Paris to work in the studio of Thomas Couture and study French history painting. During his sojourn, Johnson mastered such academic techniques as chiaroscuro and developed an interest in the realistic tradition of Dutch genre scenes.

Johnson returned to the United States in October, 1855, and over the next two decades was heralded for his ability to capture the “American scene” in innovative ways. In the 1860s he focused on slave life in Virginia, the Ojibwe Indians, the toils of the Civil War and life on the home front; and in the 1870s he increasingly depicted New England farmers at work and at leisure; women, individually, in groups, or with children; quiet interiors; and the noble seamen and farmers of Nantucket. As historian Patricia Hills has noted, much of Johnson’s appeal lay in his “celebration of the joys of rural labor,” and his “nostalgic vision of an essentially classless society” engaged in simple, peaceful tasks [Hills, Eastman Johnson (New York, 1973): 92]. During these years Johnson also completed a number of “conversation pieces,” or portraits of family groups; and after the early 1880s he turned almost exclusively to portraiture, which he seems to have practiced until 1900. Johnson died in 1906.

Eastman Johnson married Elizabeth Williams Buckley (b.1840) of Troy, New York in June 1869, and together they had one daughter, Ethel (b.1870).

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