Eastman Johnson

Eastman Johnson was born in Lovell, Maine and raised in Fryeburg and Augusta. In 1840, Johnson began his artistic career when his father placed him in an apprenticeship in a Boston lithography shop. He returned to Maine two years later and worked as a crayon portraitist, a career he pursued for the following decade. Executing portraits of family, friends, and literary and political luminaries, his crayon and chalk portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow highlight this phase of Johnson's career. Determined to study abroad, in 1849 Johnson settled in Dusseldorf, Germany, where he was accepted in the studio of the American expatriate Emanuel Leutze. In 1851 he moved to the Hague, then the artistic center of The Netherlands, and became known as "The American Rembrandt" for the style he learned by studying the Dutch masters. The death of his mother in October 1855 prompted Johnson's return to America, where he earnestly began to establish himself as a painter of contemporary American life. In 1857 he lived and painted among the native Anishinabe (Ojibwe) near Superior, Wisconsin. Eager to secure his artistic reputation, he established a New York studio and developed a wide subject repertoire from urban interiors to rural genre paintings inspired by frequent visits to Maine. His success with these subjects allowed him to cultivate a circle of patrons that included some of New York's most prominent collectors. By the end of the decade Johnson was one of New York City's most respected and popular artists.

Eastman Johnson Images:
Boyhood of Lincoln
The Old Stagecoach