David Johnson

As landscape painting gained acceptance during the middle years of the nineteenth century, many painters emerged to form a second generation of the Hudson River School. The precise realism of David Johnson (1827–1908) sets his work apart from that of his contemporaries. His accurately rendered compositions are a testament to the nineteenth-century interest in science, particularly geology. His realistic still lifes and paintings of rocky landscapes reveal a deep reverence for the natural world that reflects the cultural climate of the times. His production of landscapes dwindled in his later years as he focused more on still life painting.

Little is known of Johnson’s early life, other than that he was born in New York City and received little formal training in art; he did, however, receive private lessons from Jasper Cropsey in 1850. His first study painted in nature, Haines Fall, Kauterskill Clove, was made the year before. It seems the artist typically worked from photographs, a method that imparts a distanced, static quality to much of his work. Records indicate that Johnson was friendly with John Frederick Kensett and William Sidney Mount, among other artists of the time, and he was a longstanding member of the National Academy of Design. By the age of twenty-two, Johnson exhibited his work regularly at the National Academy and the American Art-Union. He also showed his work at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition and the Paris Salon of 1877. Johnson won his only known award at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition for a New Hampshire landscape, but it is unclear which painting of the three he showed was honored. Later critics have praised Johnson for his precisely rendered forms and his masterly handling of light, but his work seems to have been of little interest to the critics of his day; they rarely commented about his paintings or his personal character. Johnson kept a studio in New York City from 1852 until 1893, but was forced to give it up for financial reasons.

Johnson’s work, which was marked by an almost empirical treatment of his natural subjects, took a stylistic shift in the 1870s and 1880s. As scholar and museum director John Baur has observed of Johnson’s later paintings, “His main effort was apparently to wed the intimate poetry of the Barbizon school with the precisionism and luminism which are always central to his work.” [1] This redirection reflects a greater shift in artistic tastes, when the sublime landscapes of the Hudson River School fell out of favor and were replaced by the quiet contemplative paintings of the luminist style.

Notes:

[1] John I. H. Baur, “The Exact Brushwork of Mr. David Johnson, An American Landscape Painter, 1827–1908,” in American Art Journal, 12, no. 4 (Autumn 1980), 62.