Brooklyn Museum of Art
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 638-5000
www. brooklynart. org
Eastman Johnson: Painting America
Eastman Johnson: Painting America, the first retrospective in more than twenty-five years of works
by one of the most important American painters of the nineteenth century,
has been organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where it will be on view
October 29, 1999 through February 6, 2000. The presentation will include
seventy paintings and thirty-two drawings. The exhibition is scheduled to
travel to the San Diego Museum of Art (February 26-May 21, 2000) and to
the Seattle Art Museum (June 8-September 10, 2000.)
This full-scale critical reexamination of the exceptional
depth of Eastman Johnson's oeuvre will he divided into broad chronological
themes. The first sections will focus on his extraordinary talents in tile
medium of drawing. Included will be portraits of Emerson, Hawthorne, and
Longfellow as well as a selection of never-before -exhibited studies from
private and public collection s completed while the artist was in Holland
from 1851 to 1855. Also included will be a group of unusually personal portraits
of the native Anishinabe (Ojibwe) created by the artist on the Wisconsin
frontier in 1857.
Eastman Johnson: Painting America will also include important examples of work created by the artist after he became a member of the New York art scene in 1859 in a section titled New Man in New York: The Civil War Years. Among them are Negro Life at the South, with which he established his reputation; A Ride for Liberty --The Fugitive Slaves, from the BMA collection, along with other Civil War paintings; Christmas Time (The Blodgett Family); as well as lesser-known selections from this period, some of which have not been exhibited since the 1901 sale of Johnson's estate.
A section titled Home and Hearth will explore Johnson's
postwar domestic imagery and will include such works 
as Fiddling His Way and the less familiar Pension
Claim Agent. A selection of intensely personal domestic scenes created
in the years following Johnson's marriage in 1869 are represented by works
like Not at Home, from the BMA collection, and paintings of his wife,
Elizabeth Buckley Johnson. Rural Tradition examines Eastman Johnson's
transition from anecdotal rural imagery to aesthetically motivated works
like Winnowing Grain and the immensely popular painting of 1876,
Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket.
Paintings and drawings completed by Eastman Johnson on
the island of Nantucket, where he spent a substantial portion of each year
beginning in 1870, draw upon the visual character of the island and its
inhabitants and will include The Cranberry Harvest: Island of Nantucket;
Portrait of Captain Charles Myrick (Study for "Embers");
and The New Bonnet. The exhibition will close with a small group
of portraits that are among the finest works of Johnson's late years, among
them Old Man, Seated.
The exhibition will be 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. In addition to the color reproductions of all of the works in the exhibition, it will include 106 black-and-white comparative illustrations.
Two essays by Teresa A. Carbone will explore Eastman Johnson's
early career and student years in Europe as 
well as the progress of Johnson's career in New York
from 1860 to 1880, when he was the country's foremost figure painter. Patricia
Hills' essay provides an analysis of the artist's numerous and original
images of African Americans within the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Jane Weiss writes about Johnson's domestic subjects in the context of the
burgeoning domestic fiction movement of the period. A comparative study
of Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer in the postwar years is the subject
of an essay by Sarah Burns. The concluding essay by Anne C. Rose explores
the artist as member of the Civil War generation. Also included in the catalogue
will be a large selection of the artist's letters, many of which are published
for the first time, as well as a lifetime exhibition chronology that comprises
the first full listing of all the exhibition records of Johnson's work through
the 1907 Century Association Memorial Exhibition.
The exhibition has been organized by the Brooklyn Museum
of Art. The curators are Teresa A. Carbone, 
Associate Curator of American Art at the BMA, and
Patricia Hills, the preeminent Eastman Johnson scholar. It is made possible
by The Henry Luce Foundation. Inc. Additional support is provided by Mr.
and Mrs. John S. Tamagni and Blair W. Effron. Support for the catalogue
was also provided through the generosity of Furthermore, the Publication
Program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund.
A Brief Biography of Eastman Johnson (1824-1906)
Eastman Johnson was born 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 executed portraits of Hawthorne, Emerson, and Longfellow.
Determined to continue his studies abroad, in 1849 Eastman
Johnson went to Dusseldorf, 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 commmissions, 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.
Images from top to bottom (click on thumbnail images to enlarge them): Dinah, Portrait of a Negress, late 1860s; Christmas Time (The Blodgett Family), c. 1864; The Old Stage Coach, c. 1871; Catching the Bee, c. 1872; Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket, c. 1876; A Woman in a White Dress, c. 1873; Sugaring Off at the Camp, Fryeburg, ME, 1864-66
See also an image of an Eastman Johnson painting from the Timken Museum. Read more in Resource Library about the Brooklyn Museum of Art
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For further biographical information on selected artists cited above please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.
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