Eastman Johnson Biography

Dromo's Den

JOHNSON, Eastman (1824-1906). An American genre and portrait painter, born at Lovell, Me., July 29, 1824, and educated in the public schools of Augusta. When 18 years of age, he made several portraits in black and white. In 1845 be spent one year in Washington, D. C., painting the portraits of Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams. In the three following years, during his residence in Boston, he painted the portraits of Longfellow and his family, of Emerson, and Hawthorne. In 1849 he went abroad, studying with Leutze and at the Royal Academy, Düsseldorf; then in Paris, Italy, and Holland. He spent five years at The Hague, painting with such success that he was offered the position of court painter to remain. His work there included the well-known pictures, "The Savoyard" and "The Card Players." He returned to the United States in 1856, spending one year in the Indian country on the shores of Lake Superior. In 1860 he settled in New York and was elected a member of the National Academy of Design in the same year. He appealed to popular taste, painting simple themes of real life with a sound and thorough technique, little influenced by the Düsseldorf school. His portraits are dignified and fine in characterization; his genre pictures are better than anything done before in the United States -the subjects are treated with a wholesome naturalism and a breadth of handling lacking in his portraits. Many of his works have been lithographed and engraved. Among his chief works are: "Spanish Woman" (1862); "Old Stage Coach" (1871); "Milton Dictating to his Daughters" (1875); "Cranberry Harvest" (1880); portraits of Presidents Cleveland and Harrison, of Theodore D. Woolsey, John D. Rockefeller, William H. Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, William Waldorf Astor, Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, Mrs. Augustus Belmont, and Mrs. Hamilton Fish. The Metropolitan Museum, New York, possesses two portraits by him ("Two Men" and Sanford R. Gifford) and "Corn Husking at Nantucket"; the New York Historical Society, his portrait of Augustus Schell; and the Public Library, New York, his famous "Old Kentucky Home" and two others.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 739.