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EASTMAN JOHNSON

1824-1906

CountryMaine, USA

CountryNew York City, New York, USA

BiographyIn 1840 he began his artistic training in a Boston lithography shop. His talents as a draftsman soon led him to become a crayon portraitist, a career he pursued for the following decade in Washington, D.C., and in Boston, where he executed portraits of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Longfellow.
Determined to continue his studies abroad, in 1849 Eastman Johnson went to Düsseldorf, where tie found a place in the studio of the American expatriate Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. In 1851 he moved to The Hague, then the artistic center of The Netherlands, where he studied and worked until 1855. He returned to the United States after a brief stay in Paris, where he worked under the academician Thomas Couture. After his return to Washington, D.C., Eastman Johnson began to establish himself as a painter of contemporary American subjects. In 1857 he lived and painted among the native Anishinabe (Ojibwe) in Wisconsin. Eager to secure his reputation, in 1858 he established a New York studio, where he completed Negro Life at the South, which was acclaimed at the National Academy of Design the following year. In the following decade he continued to create ground breaking
paintings with African-American subjects such as A Ride for Liberty --The Fugitive Slaves.. At the same time he developed a reputation for domestic subjects, which became his main source of income, cultivated a circle of patrons that included some of the city's most prominent collectors, and became by the end of the decade one of New York City's most respected and popular artists.
Johnson developed a wide subject repertoire ranging from urban interiors to rural genre paintings inspired by frequent visits to Maine. In the years following his marriage in 1869, he extended his subject matter to include personal domestic imagery that depicted his wife and young daughter. From 1870 he also began exploring a new type of rural genre and rustic interior, inspired by subjects on the island of Nantucket, where he spent a part of each year. Aware of the younger generation of Realists returning from study in Europe, he constantly made efforts to update his own style.
After 1880 Eastman Johnson painted fewer genre subjects and devoted his energy primarily to formal portrait commissions, for which he was in great demand. By the time of his death in 1906, Johnson was among a very few American artists who had begun their careers in the antebellum period and an even smaller group of artists of his generation who had remained in public favor for much of the course of his career--during which he had forged new American themes and guided American figure painting into an era of determined Realism.

Information taken from: http://www.tfaoi.com/newsm1/n1m212.htm
Entered by: Michael Clayton, Print Study Room Staff, 2/7/06

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