Eastman Johnson
Eastman Johnson began his career in art at the age of 16, after becoming engaged as an apprentice to the Bufford's lithography firm in Boston, Massachusetts. However, in 1844 he returned to Maine to pursue a growing passion for portrait drawing. A year later, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he was commissioned to draw the portraits of a number of that city's prominent citizens, including Dolly Madison and John Quincy Adams. Other opportunities for portrait commissions brought him back to Boston, where he drew the likenesses of some of the nation's well-known romantic poets: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Like many young American artists, he was inspired by the work of the contemporary German masters he viewed at New York's Düsseldorf Gallery. He subsequently traveled to Germany and studied for two years at the Düsseldorf Academy. It was there that he met and shared a studio with another American, Emanuel Leutze. Leutze is best known for his large painting titled Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851; Metropolitan Museum of Art) Several other American artists studied at the Düsseldorf Academy during these years as well, including Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge. Ultimately, Johnson found the German Romantic painting style of his teachers, Aschenbach and Lessing, a bit too insipid for his taste. He visited London and Paris and then moved to The Hague, where he studied for four years. It was in Amsterdam that Johnson studied the work of 17th century Dutch and Flemish masters Rembrandt and Van Dyck. Their paintings inspired him to develop a freer handling of paint, a richer palette and a penchant for picturesque subjects.
While in the Netherlands he became known as the "American Rembrandt"—an image he partly inspired by attending society balls dressed as a 17th century Dutch burgher. Johnson went on to Paris, where he studied with Thomas Couture. He studied closely the peasant life paintings of Jules Breton and Jean François Millet, more for their celebration of honest rural life than any political statement of class warfare. However, the premature death of his mother necessitated Johnson's return to America.
He subsequently painted Indians and frontier life in Wisconsin, and worked briefly as a portraitist in Cincinnati, before moving to New York's Greenwich Village in 1858. Despite this new "cosmopolitan" existence, he became renowned for his sophisticated portrayals of American rural life. His first major work depicted the slave quarters in the backyard of his father's home in Kentucky and was called Negro Life in the South, (later renamed Old Kentucky Home after Stephen Foster’s Song.) It was shown in the exhibition Life in the South at the National Academy of Design. The work was well received in both the North and the South, so much so that his acclaim prompted the Academy to elect him to the position of academician in 1860. During the next decades, Johnson developed themes that ranged from runaway slaves and heroic Union troops to more rustic depictions of young women and children. He drew much of his material from his first-hand observations of the Union troops during the Civil War and created interpretations of the war's impact on Americans at home. Like the work of his contemporaries, William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham and Winslow Homer, his genre art was filled with humor, good nature and optimism. As a result, his bucolic scenes emanate a happy, objective healthiness, a vitality and gentle human appeal.
References: see John I. H. Baur, An American Genre Painter: Eastman Johnson, 1824-1906 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn Museum, 1940); Michael David Zellman, American Art Analog Vol. I. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 209; Michael David Zellman, American Art Analog Vol. II. (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 378.