San Diego Museum of Art
photo: John Hazeltine
Balboa Park, San Diego, CA
619-232-7931
Eastman Johnson: Painting America
One of the most important American painters
of the 19th century will be highlighted at the San Diego Museum of Art this
spring. Eastman Johnson: Painting America is a comprehensive retrospective
of Johnson' s career, which spanned the Civil War through the turn of the
century. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the presentation includes
68 paintings and 32 drawings, and will be on view Feb. 26 through May 21,
2000. (left: Fiddling His Way, 1866, oil on canvas, Chrysler
Museum of Art)
"Johnson's paintings now stand as American icons--extraordinary for their originality and quintessentially American subject matter," said D. Scott Atkinson, SDMA curator of American art. "This exhibition includes all of Johnson's subjects--from early portrait drawings, to Civil War subjects, domestic interiors, highly acclaimed rural genre and late portraits."
This full scale critical examination of Eastman Johnson'
s work is divided into thematic sections. 
The first section focuses on his talents in the medium
of drawing.Included are portraits of Emerson, Hawthorne and Longfellow,
as well as a selection of never-before-exhibited studies, now in private
and public collections, that were completed while Johnson resided in The
Netherlands, from 1851 to 1855. Also included is a group of portraits of
Ojibwe Indians produced in Wisconsin in the 1850s. (left: In the
Hayloft, c. 1877-78, oil on canvas, San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of
Mrs. H. S. Darlington)
Johnson's portrayal of African-Americans is examined in
another section of the exhibition. 
Exceptional for their honesty, sympathy and directness,
the images he created were some of the first paintings to show the reality
of African-American life in the mid-1800s. Among the works in the show portraying
this theme are Negro Life at the South, with which Johnson established
his reputation, and A Ride for Liberty--The Fugitive Slaves. (right:
Woman Reading, c. 1874, oil on board, San Diego Museum of Art)
Post-war domestic imagery is explored through paintings such as the San Diego Museum of Art' s own two Johnson paintings-- In the Hayloft (a charming interior barn scene featuring the children of some of Johnson's friends) and Woman Reading (a contemplative scene of a woman reading by the seashore). A selection of intensely personal domestic scenes created in the years following Johnson's marriage in 1869 are also on view, including paintings of his wife, Elizabeth Buckley Johnson.
Johnson spent a considerable amount of time on the island
of Nantucket, where he created paintings 
and drawings capturing the visual character of the
island and its inhabitants. Many of these works, as well as a small group
of portraits completed in Johnson' s later years, are also included in the
exhibition. (right: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket,
1880, oil on canvas, Timken Museum)
Eastman Johnson, Painting America is accompanied by a catalogue that is the first major publication on Eastman Johnson since 1972, and the first ever to illustrate his work in full color.
Eastman Johnson
Eastman Johnson was born in 1824 and raised in southwestern
Maine. In 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 created portraits
of Hawthorne, Emerson and Longfellow. (right: The Old Stage Coach,
1871, oil on canvas, Milwaukee Art Museum, Layton Art Collection, gift of
Frederick Layton)
Determined to continue his studies abroad, in 1849, Johnson went to Düsseldorf, Germany, where he 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., 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 establish a national reputation, in 1858 Johnson established a New York
City studio, where he completed Negro Life at the South, which received
acclaim at the National Academy of Design's exhibition the following year.
In the following decade he continued to create groundbreaking 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. Johnson also 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' s most respected and popular
artists. He developed a wide subject repertoire, ranging from urban interiors
to rural genre paintings, inspired by frequent visits to Maine. (left:
Catching the Bee, 1872, oil on canvas, The Newark Museum, Scudder
Bequest)
In the years following his marriage in 1869, Johnson extended his subject matter to include personal domestic imagery of his wife and young daughter. In 1870, he began to explore a new type of rural genre and rustic interiors, 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, 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 small group of 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 most of his career -- during which he had forged new American themes
and guided American figure painting into an era of realism. Johnson died
in 1906. (left: Sugaring Off at the Camp, Fryeburg, Maine, 1864-66,
oil on canvas, Curtis Galleries)
rev. 3/14/00
Please also see our article Eastman Johnson: Painting America (5/14/99) on the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
.
Read more about the San Diego Museum of Art in Resource Library Magazine.
For further biographical information on selected artists cited above please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.
rev. 12/27/10
Search Resource Library for thousands of articles and essays on American art.
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