Eastman Johnson

, oil on canvas, 21 × 25 in., 1876 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. 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. ==Career==

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. They took part in the Düsseldorf school of painting. In January 1851, Johnson was accepted into the studio of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, a German who had lived in the United States for a while before returning to Germany. 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. 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. ==Style==

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. Some of his paintings, such as Ojibwe Wigwam at Grand Portage, are highly realistic, with details seen in the later photorealism movement. 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 matter==

Portraits 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 England 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. 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. 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. Slavery '', oil on canvas, 1859, 36 × 45 in. 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. 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.) , oil on paperboard, ca. 1862, Brooklyn MuseumA 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. Johnson noted at the time that the painting is based on his observations during the Civil War Battle of Manassas. ==Gallery==

File: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 File: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 File: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 File:The Hatch Family MET DT85.jpg|The Hatch Family, oil on canvas, c. 1870—1871, Metropolitan Museum of Art File:Old_stagecoach_eastman_johnson.jpg|The Old Stagecoach, oil on canvas, 1871, Milwaukee Art Museum File:Eastman Johnson - Not at Home - Google Art Project.jpg|''Not at Home (An Interior of the Artist's House)'' c. 1873. Brooklyn Museum File:Eastman Johnson - Portrait of a Child - Google Art Project.jpg|Winter, Portrait of a Child, 1879. Brooklyn Museum File:1880, Johnson, Eastman, Study for A Glass with the Squire.jpg|Study for A Glass with the Squire, 1880, Princeton University Art Museum File:Joseph Wesley Harper by Eastman Johnson.png|Joseph Wesley Harper, c. 1880 File:Ruth Eastman Johnson.jpeg|Ruth, oil on panel, 1880–1885, Albright-Knox Art Gallery File:Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard by Eastman Johnson.png|Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, 1886 File:MD John Call Dalton by Eastman Johnson.png|John Call Dalton, M.D., 1886 File:Eastman Johnson - The Nantucket School of Philosophy - Walters 37311.jpg|The Nantucket School of Philosophy, 1887. The Walters Art Museum File:Chester Alan Arthur by Eastman Johnson.png|Chester Alan Arthur, 1887 File:Brooklyn Museum - Self Portrait - Eastman Johnson - overall.jpg|Self-portrait of Eastman Johnson, oil on canvas, c. 1890, Brooklyn Museum File:Seth Low by Eastman Johnson.png|Seth Low, c. 1890 File:Benjamin Harrison by Eastman Johnson.png|Benjamin Harrison, c. 1890–1900 File:Stephen Grover Cleveland by Eastman Johnson.png|Stephen Grover Cleveland, c. 1890–1900 File:Jay Gould by Eastman Johnson.jpg|Jay Gould, 1896 File:John Howard Van Amringe by Eastman Johnson.png|John Howard Van Amringe, 1900 ==Notes==