One of the most elegant artists of the last half of the nineteenth century, Eastman Johnson became famous for his insights into American culture and his efforts to establish the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Background
Eastman Johnson was born in Lovell, Maine, in 1824, the eighth and last child of Philip Carrigan Johnson and Mary Kimball Chandler. His elder siblings were Philip, sisters Harriet, Judith, Mary, Sarah, and Nell, and brother Reuben. Eastman grew up in Fryeburg and Augusta, where the family lived at Pleasant Street and later at 61 Winthrop Street. His father was the owner of several businesses, and active in fraternal organizations: he was Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Maine. He was appointed in 1840 as Secretary of State for Maine, serving two years.
Education
Johnson studied for two years at the Royal Academy in Düsseldorf, Germany.
At an early age, Eastman Johnson began working in the dry goods business, and in 1840, he was sent to a lithography shop in Boston. However, he found lithography to be monotonous and unfulfilling, and four years later, he returned to Augusta and worked as a crayon portraitist. He had a natural aptitude for art and attended art school in New York before moving to Washington. Working for the U.S. Senate, he painted portraits of Dolly Madison, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and other famous public figures. Soon after, in 1846, he went back to Boston, where he opened a studio in Tremont Temple and produced portraits in crayon of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his family, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In 1849, with the encouragement of the American Art Union, Johnson, accompanied by George Henry Hall, sailed to Europe for what would be six years of study. Johnson settled in Düsseldorf, Germany, a popular destination for young American artists. He enrolled in Düsseldorf Académie, where he started to work with colors, and in 1851, he entered the studio of Emanuel Leutze. During a stay in The Hague, Johnson studied seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, mainly works by Rembrandt and Anthony Van Dyck, and captured old Dutch traditions. Under this Dutch influence, the artist’s style evolved to include richer colors, dynamic design and exciting contrasts of light and shadow. Before returning to Washington in 1855, he spent two months in Paris, where he worked briefly with the French academic painter, Thomas Couture.
In the two years after his return to the United States, Johnson spent time in Superior, Wisconsin, painting the Indians of that area. After a short stay in Cincinnati in 1858, he moved to New York and opened a studio in the Old University Building in Washington Square. At an April 1859 exhibition at the National Academy of Design, he showed three crayon drawings, one of which – "Negro Life in the South, or Old Kentucky Home" – would come to be regarded as his most original and remarkable work. This large painting – which depicts a moment in the life of slaves in the nation’s capital – brought fame to Johnson and established him as a major American genre artist.
In 1869, Johnson married Elizabeth Buckley of Troy, with whom he had a daughter. The following year, he visited Nantucket, and in 1871, he built a house there where he would spend his summers. In Nantucket, he worked with rural subjects and produced a series depicting cranberry harvesting.
Over the course of his fruitful career, Johnson developed a reputation as an accomplished and adept painter of not only individual and group portraits but also urban scenes and landscapes. He had a feel for color, and his depictions of groups of farmers are often charismatic in tone. His subjects range from farm scenes to country house interiors to rural genre painting. The Dutch influence can be seen in paintings such as "The Mount Vernon Kitchen" (1857) and "Susan Ray’s Kitchen" (1875).
In 1906, at the age of 82, an ill and feeble Johnson began to show signs of heart weakness. He died in New York, surrounded by his wife Elizabeth, his daughter Ethel and his son-in-law Alfred Ronald Conkling.