Eastman Johnson
Eastman Johnson’s artistic interests and subjects were wide-ranging, from agricultural activities to Civil War subjects to the lives of African Americans and Native Americans to genteel families in domestic interiors. A native of Maine, Johnson traveled widely throughout his lifetime, working as a young man as a lithographer in Boston, moving with his family when his father’s government position took them to Washington, D.C., and becoming one of the first American artists before the Civil War to spend significant periods of time studying in Europe.
His extensive artistic education in Europe included training at the prestigious Dusseldorf Art Academy, a significant period of time studying the work of the Dutch Old Masters in the Hague, private tutoring with the French artist Thomas Couture in Paris, and a trip to London for the 1851 Universal Exposition.
Two years after his return to the United States, Johnson painted the work that launched his career: Negro Life at the South (1859). A complex and powerful piece, the painting depicts a group of African Americans in the yard of a ramshackle building. The viewer can just make out the elegant details of a second building, a large urban residence, in the upper-right-hand corner of the painting. The African Americans, then, are household servants who work for the owners of the larger home; further, given the date and the place of the work’s creation (Washington, D.C.), they are likely slaves. The topic of slavery was explosive in 1859, just two years before the outbreak of the Civil War, and the painting attracted a great deal of attention. The work’s success may lie in its ambiguity; viewers sympathetic to the move for emancipation focused on the humanity of the individuals portrayed as well as the poignantly shabby condition of their living quarters. Viewers who supported the “peculiar institution” of slavery chose instead to focus on the seeming idleness of the characters that dance, play music, flirt and relax in an unkempt yard. The painting was enormously successful, and led to Johnson’s election to the National Academy of Design in 1860.
Johnson continued to enjoy success for the remainder of his career, producing genre studies of agricultural activities such as maple-sugaring in Maine and cranberry-picking on Nantucket. He also specialized in elegant portraits of prominent members of society. By the time of his death in 1906, he had achieved a significant reputation both in New York City and in the larger art world.
