Eastman Johnson

Jonathan Eastman Johnson ( born July 29, 1824 in Lovell, Maine, † April 5, 1906 in New York City ) was an American painter of the 19th century. He was known especially for his portrait and landscape painting and was one of the first American artists of his era, who received extensive training in Europe.

Life and work

Eastman Johnson was born in 1824 as the eighth and last child of Philip Carrigan Johnson (Secretary of State of Maine after 1840 ) and his wife Mary Kimball Chandler in Oxford County, Maine, and grew up near Fryeburg. In 1834 he moved with his parents to Augusta, where his father worked as an employee of the State Government. In 1840 he began a two-year training in the lithographic business of JH Bufford in Boston, after which he was from 1842 to 1845 as an itinerant portrait artist in New England and Washington DC road and from 1846 to 1849, he worked as a portraitist in Boston with the support of the family of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was, among other well-known personalities of his time as Dolley Madison and John Quincy Adams.

From 1849 to 1851 Johnson moved to Germany and studied in Dusseldorf at the art academy at Henry mosquito. When Emanuel Leutze he took private lessons. From 1850 to 1852 he was a member of the Düsseldorf artist club paintbox. In 1851 he traveled to the Great Exhibition Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London; then he lived from 1851 to 1855 in The Hague, where he was primarily supported by the U.S. ambassador August Belmont. In 1855 he studied for a few months with Thomas Couture in Paris, before he returned to America because of his mother's death.

Between 1855 and 1859 he traveled among others to Washington DC, Cincinnati and Superior in Wisconsin, where he also painted Indians of the Chippewa tribe. In 1859 he set up his studio in New York City. In 1859, he became known due to the exhibition of Negro Life at the South work at the New York Historical Society, and he was only an associate member in 1860 then a full member of the National Academy of Design in New York, where he taught until 1869. In the following years, he traveled to Maine and spent his summers from 1870 in Nantucket in Massachusetts. He painted mainly interiors and rural motifs. 1885 and 1897 were made more trips to Europe. In addition, Johnson was active in several organizations, especially the National Academy, the Century Club and the Union League Club, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on whose foundation he was involved, and the Society of American Artists. After 1880 he devoted himself, however, almost exclusively of portraiture.

Style

Johnson initially used a clear and detailed painting style, reminiscent of the work of George Charles Bingham and William Sidney Mount. At the beginning of the 1870s, he developed a parallel skizzenhaftere technique, which he used mainly in landscape painting.

Image selection

The Girl I Left Behind Me, 1875

Comparison of Cranberry Pickers, Nantucket, 1879, and The Cranberry Harvest, Iceland of Nantucket, 1880