Eastman Johnson
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Jonathan Eastman Johnson (July 29, 1824 – April 5, 1906)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance. He was best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His later works often show the influence of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; he was known as The American Rembrandt in his day.<ref name="davis"/>
LifeEdit
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Johnson was born in Lovell, Maine, one of the eight children of Philip Carrigan Johnson and Mary Kimball Chandler (born in New Hampshire, October 18, 1796, married 1818). His siblings were brothers Reuben and Philip, sisters Harriet, Judith, Mary, Sarah and Nell. (His younger brother Philip became a Commodore in the United States Navy and father of Vice Admiral Alfred Wilkinson Johnson.)
Eastman grew up in Fryeburg and Augusta, where the family lived at Pleasant Street and later at 61 Winthrop Street.<ref name=artclick>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His father was the owner of several businesses, and active in fraternal organizations: he was Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Maine (ancient Free and Accepted Masons) (1836–1844). He was appointed in 1840 as Secretary of State for Maine, serving two years.<ref name="davis">John Davis, "Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South and Urban Slavery in Washington, D.C.", Art Bulletin, March 1998, at JSTOR, accessed January 26, 2014</ref>
CareerEdit
Eastman Johnson's career as an artist began when his father apprenticed him in 1840 to a Boston lithographer. After his father's political patron, the Governor of Maine John Fairfield, entered the US Senate, the senior Johnson was appointed by US President James Polk in the late 1840s as Chief Clerk in the Bureau of Construction, Equipment, and Repair of the Navy Department. The family moved to Washington, DC and first lived in rental housing. In 1853, they bought a new rowhouse at 266 F Street, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets and a few blocks from the White House and the Navy Department offices, which became their permanent home.<ref name="davis"/> Although the young Johnson lived for a time in Boston, and studied in Europe, he used this home as his base until moving to New York City in the late 1850s.<ref name="davis"/>
The young Johnson moved to Washington, D.C. at about age 20, supporting himself by making crayon portraits, including John Quincy Adams, and Dolly Madison, and likely helped by his father's political connections.<ref name="davis"/> He returned to New England, settling in Boston in 1846 at the age of 22.Template:Sfn
In 1849, Johnson went overseas to Germany, for further studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. This had become a new center where many artists, including many Americans, studied art.<ref name=andr-egl>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name=beyer>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> They took part in the Düsseldorf school of painting. In January 1851, Johnson was accepted into the studio of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze,Template:Sfn<ref name=tfaoi>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web
}}</ref> a German who had lived in the United States for a while before returning to Germany.<ref name=andr-egl/> His major work completed there is his portrait of Worthington Whittredge.Template:Sfn
Johnson moved to The Hague, where he studied 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters. He ended his European travels in Paris, studying with the academic painter Thomas Couture in 1855 before returning to the United States that year due to the death of his mother.
In 1856, he visited his sister Sarah and her family in Superior, Wisconsin.Template:Sfn His mixed-race guide Stephen Bonga, who was Ojibwe and African-American, took Johnson among the native Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) in the areas around Superior. Throughout 1857 Johnson frequently painted them in intimate, casual poses.<ref name=tfaoi/> According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, Johnson traveled with Bonga to the areas today known as Grand Portage National Monument, Apostle Islands National Monument, and Isle Royale National Park.<ref name="stephenB">"Portrait of Stephen Bonga", Wisconsin Historical Images, accessed January 23, 2014</ref>
By 1859, Johnson had returned to the East and established a studio in New York City. He secured his reputation as an American artist that year with an exhibit at the National Academy of Design featuring his painting, Negro Life at the South (1859) or, as it was popularly called, Old Kentucky Home. It was set in the urban back yards of Washington, DC rather than on a plantation.<ref name=NYHS/><ref name=pbsrfl>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> That year Johnson was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1860.
Johnson also became a member of the Union League Club of New York, which holds many of his paintings. In 1869, at the age of 55, he married for the first time, to Elizabeth Buckley. They had one daughter, Ethel Eastman Johnson, born in 1870. Ethel married Alfred Ronalds Conkling (nephew of Senator Roscoe Conkling) in 1896.
When he died in 1906 at age 81, Eastman Johnson was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
StyleEdit
Johnson's style is largely realistic in both subject matter and in execution. His charcoal sketches were not strongly influenced by period artists, but are informed more by his lithography training. Later works show influence by the 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters, and also by Jean-François Millet. Echoes of Millet's The Gleaners can be seen in Johnson's The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, although the emotional tone of the work is far different.
His careful portrayal of individuals rather than stereotypes enhances the realism of his paintings. Ojibwe artist Carl Gawboy notes that the faces in the 1857 portraits of Ojibwe people by Johnson are recognizable in people in the Ojibwe community today.<ref name=minnpr>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Some of his paintings, such as Ojibwe Wigwam at Grand Portage, are highly realistic, with details seen in the later photorealism movement.<ref name=cmcs>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
His careful attention to light sources contributes to the realism. Portraits, Girl and Pets and The Boy Lincoln, make use of single light sources in a manner that is similar to the 17th-century Dutch Masters whom he had studied in The Hague in the 1850s.
Subject matterEdit
PortraitsEdit
Johnson's subject matter included portraits of the wealthy and influential, from the President of the United States, to literary figures, to unnamed individuals. He is best known for his paintings of everyday people in everyday scenes. Johnson often repainted the same subject changing style or details.
New EnglandEdit
His works of New England life, such as The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, The Old Stagecoach, Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket, The Sap Gatherers, and Sugaring Off at the Camp, Fryeburg, Maine, established him as a genre painter. Over the course of five years, he made many sketches and smaller paintings of the processing of maple sap into maple sugar, but never completed the larger work he had started.<ref name=so>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
In contrast, he developed the much celebrated Old Stagecoach mostly in his studio, and he carefully planned its composition. The stage coach was based on an abandoned coach which he had come across and sketched while hiking in the Catskills. He used local children recruited as models from near his Nantucket studio. Despite this artifice, the painting was celebrated as wholesome, natural and bucolic.<ref name=ejpa/>
OjibweEdit
In 1856–1857, Johnson visited his sister Sarah and brother in Superior on the western frontier of Wisconsin at Lake Superior. He was aided in traveling in the area and in meeting Ojibwe people by Stephen Bonga, an interpreter and guide of Ojibwe/African-American parents.<ref name="stephenB"/>
Carl Gawboy, a modern-day Ojibwe artist, speculates that Johnson's time with Bonga and his mixed-race family (Bonga had an Ojibwe wife as well as mother) changed his approach to painting.<ref name=minnpr/> Certainly Johnson was successful in getting many Ojibwe to sit for him as subjects. In his drawings and paintings, Johnson portrayed Ojibwe people in a more intimate and relaxed manner than was usual for paintings of that period. Also unusual was that he often included the subject's names in the titles of the works. He did not focus solely on individual portraits, but also did paintings and sketches of scenes which include Ojibwe dwellings, St. Louis Bay, and other groupings of Ojibwe in everyday activities.<ref name=minnpr/><ref name=cmcs/>
Johnson left Wisconsin due to a widespread financial panic, which rendered his real estate investments there worthless. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to earn money by portrait commissions, and never returned to the subject of the Ojibwe.<ref name=ejpa>Template:Cite book</ref> His paintings and sketches of the Ojibwe remained unsold during his lifetime. They are now owned by the St. Louis County Historical Society in Duluth, Minnesota.<ref>Eastman Johnson's Ojibwe works, St. Louis County Historical Society</ref>
SlaveryEdit
Negro Life at the South (1859), completed shortly before the Civil War began, is considered Johnson's masterpiece. Because of its complexity, it has been analyzed and interpreted at length by scholars.<ref>Patricia Hills. "Painting Race: Eastman Johnson's Pictures of Slaves, Ex-Slaves, and Freedmen", In Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills, ed., Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 1999, Brooklyn Museum of Art.</ref><ref name=ejh/> The painting depicts an urban "back street" scene of slaves in Washington, DC, although it became popularly known from that year as Old Kentucky Home (based on the song "My Old Kentucky Home" by Stephen Foster) and was referred to as showing plantation life.<ref name="davis"/><ref name=NYHS>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The painting shows a range of domestic activities behind a dilapidated house, with a house of better condition to the right. (The setting is the backyard of slave quarters near Johnson's father's house in Washington.)<ref name=NYHS/>
On the left in the foreground are a young black man and light-skinned woman courting,<ref name="davis"/> in the middle is a banjo player making music, where an adult woman dances with a child, as others look on. At the right edge, a young white woman in a refined white dress steps over a threshold from the house next door into this world, with another black figure behind her. (She is Johnson's sister.<ref name=NYHS/>) An adult black woman looks out an upstairs window as she steadies a small light-skinned child sitting on the partially collapsed roof. The woman dancing with the child in the middle foreground has the darkest skin; nearly each individual is painted with a different skin tone.Template:Citation needed
These variations among "people of color" reflect African-American society of the Upper South, but also invite the viewer to contemplate the mixed racial ancestry of those portrayed.<ref name="davis"/> Several elements hint at or symbolize relations to an unseen wealthier white father—the mulatto children, the ladder from the Negro quarters up to a larger house next door and, symbolically, the rooster high in the tree near the taller house and hen on the Negroes' house roof.<ref name=ejh/>Template:Page needed Both proponents and detractors of slavery perceived this painting as supporting their world views, because the Negroes seem cheerful enough, but their house is dilapidated.<ref name="davis"/><ref name=ejh>Eleanor Jones Harvey. 2012. The Civil War in American Art. Yale University Press. Template:ISBN. (at google books)</ref>Template:Page needed
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A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves (1862), which depicts a slave family riding at dawn to freedom, also invites interpretation. Johnson places the slave family squarely in the center of the work, acting as agents of their own destiny.<ref name="harvey"/> It appears to be dawn and in the distance is light on bayonets, indicating Union lines.<ref name="harvey"/> A man rides with a child in front of him; behind him, a woman holds an infant close to her chest. She looks behind her as if worried about pursuers, or wondering what she left behind.<ref name="harvey"/> Curator Eleanor Harvey writes the painting "captures the moment when the full scope of the slavery question begins to loom. Johnson placed these people squarely in the foreground and, in doing so, elevated their plight in the national debate."<ref name="harvey">"The Civil War and American Art: A Ride for Liberty?", Eye Level blog, Smithsonian American Art Museum, February 21, 2013</ref>
Johnson noted at the time that the painting is based on his observations during the Civil War Battle of Manassas.<ref name=pbsrfl/>
His work, The Lord is My Shepherd (1863), shows an African-American man reading from the Bible, presumably from Psalm chapter 23, given the name of Eastman's work. Here he sits against a blue jacket that may indicate service in the Union army. It was painted soon after the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, by which many blacks made their exodus from slavery to freedom. Reading was seen as key to the ability of freedmen to make progress.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>
GalleryEdit
- The Young Sweep Eastman Johnson 1863.jpeg
A Young Sweep, oil on canvas, 1863, 18 1/2 × 16 1/2 in. (47 × 41.9 cm) Detroit Institute of Arts
- Eastman Johnson, The Lord is My Shepherd.jpg
The Lord is My Shepherd, oil on canvas, c. 1863, 17 × 13 in. (42 × 33 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum
- The Girl I Left Behind Me.JPG
The Girl I Left Behind Me, oil on canvas, c. 1870–1875, 42 x 35 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum
- The Hatch Family MET DT85.jpg
The Hatch Family, oil on canvas, c. 1870—1871, Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Old stagecoach eastman johnson.jpg
The Old Stagecoach, oil on canvas, 1871, Milwaukee Art Museum
- Eastman Johnson - Not at Home - Google Art Project.jpg
Not at Home (An Interior of the Artist's House) c. 1873. Brooklyn Museum
- Eastman Johnson - Portrait of a Child - Google Art Project.jpg
Winter, Portrait of a Child, 1879. Brooklyn Museum
- 1880, Johnson, Eastman, Study for A Glass with the Squire.jpg
Study for A Glass with the Squire, 1880, Princeton University Art Museum
- Joseph Wesley Harper by Eastman Johnson.png
Joseph Wesley Harper, c. 1880
- Ruth Eastman Johnson.jpeg
Ruth, oil on panel, 1880–1885, Albright-Knox Art Gallery
- Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard by Eastman Johnson.png
- MD John Call Dalton by Eastman Johnson.png
John Call Dalton, M.D., 1886
- Eastman Johnson - The Nantucket School of Philosophy - Walters 37311.jpg
The Nantucket School of Philosophy, 1887. The Walters Art Museum
- Chester Alan Arthur by Eastman Johnson.png
Chester Alan Arthur, 1887
- Brooklyn Museum - Self Portrait - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg
Self-portrait of Eastman Johnson, oil on canvas, c. 1890, Brooklyn Museum
- Seth Low by Eastman Johnson.png
Seth Low, c. 1890
- Benjamin Harrison by Eastman Johnson.png
Benjamin Harrison, c. 1890–1900
- Stephen Grover Cleveland by Eastman Johnson.png
Stephen Grover Cleveland, c. 1890–1900
- Jay Gould by Eastman Johnson.jpg
Jay Gould, 1896
- John Howard Van Amringe by Eastman Johnson.png
John Howard Van Amringe, 1900
NotesEdit
ReferencesEdit
- Attribution
External linksEdit
Template:Sister project Template:EB1911 poster
- b1285373 1 Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861], an exhibition catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Eastman Johnson (see index)
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