(1824–1906)
Eastman Johnson grew up in Maine and took his first step towards becoming an artist when he apprenticed at a lithography firm in Boston around 1840. By 1844 he was creating exquisite portraits in crayon, first in Portland, Maine, and then in Washington, D. C., and Boston, where he drew Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Arriving in Düsseldorf, in present-day Germany, in 1849, he studied at the Royal Academy and with Emanuel Leutze. His 1851 move to the Hague, in the Netherlands, exposed him to the work of Rembrandt van Rijn and seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters, who were little known outside of Holland at the time, and whose work had a profound influence on Johnson’s mature style.
After returning to the United States in 1855, Johnson made two trips to the region around Lake Superior before settling in New York around 1859, when he made a splash at the National Academy of Design with his masterpiece Negro Life at the South (New-York Historical Society). Following the great success of this work, he settled in New York late in 1861 and rented a studio residence in the University Building on Washington Square, where his neighbors were a number of rising figure painters, including Winslow Homer. Johnson focused on genre paintings, including subjects taken from his new surroundings.
Johnson was an active member of the New York City artists’ community, joining the Century Association in 1862, and the Union League Club in 1867. In that same year he was a member of the council of the National Academy of Design, and, in 1868–69, taught at the school there. In the summer of 1868, Johnson spent time in the Catskill Mountains. During the war years, Johnson alternated his activities, spending some time traveling with the Union Army, recording details that he incorporated into paintings through the 1870s, and wintering in Fryeburg, Maine, where he sketched and painted the maple sugar harvesters he remembered from his youth. At the same time, he cultivated a special niche as a painter of American rural life, presented in terms that were positive, wholesome, and nostalgic for a simpler era.
