27 Facts About Eastman Johnson

Jonathan Eastman Johnson was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance.

Eastman Johnson was best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Eastman Johnson's siblings were brothers Reuben and Philip, sisters Harriet, Judith, Mary, Sarah and Nell.

Eastman Johnson's father was the owner of several businesses, and active in fraternal organizations: he was Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Maine.

Eastman Johnson was appointed in 1840 as Secretary of State for Maine, serving two years.

The young Eastman Johnson moved to Washington, DC at about age 20, supporting himself by making crayon portraits, including John Quincy Adams, and Dolly Madison, and likely helped by his father's political connections.

Eastman Johnson returned to New England, settling in Boston in 1846 at the age of 22.

In 1849, Eastman Johnson went overseas to Germany, for further studies at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.

In January 1851, Eastman Johnson was accepted into the studio of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, a German who had lived in the United States for a while before returning to Germany.

Eastman Johnson moved to The Hague, where he studied 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters.

Eastman Johnson ended his European travels in Paris, studying with the academic painter Thomas Couture in 1855 before returning to the United States that year due to the death of his mother.

Eastman Johnson secured his reputation as an American artist that year with an exhibit at the National Academy of Design featuring his painting, Negro Life at the South or, as it was popularly called, Old Kentucky Home.

That year Eastman Johnson was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1860.

Eastman Johnson became a member of the Union League Club of New York, which holds many of his paintings.

When he died in 1906 at age 81, Eastman Johnson was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Eastman Johnson's style is largely realistic in both subject matter and in execution.

Ojibwe artist Carl Gawboy notes that the faces in the 1857 portraits of Ojibwe people by Eastman Johnson are recognizable in people in the Ojibwe community today.

Eastman Johnson is best known for his paintings of everyday people in everyday scenes.

Eastman Johnson often repainted the same subject changing style or details.

Eastman Johnson used local children recruited as models from near his Nantucket studio.

Certainly Eastman Johnson was successful in getting many Ojibwe to sit for him as subjects.

Eastman Johnson did not focus solely on individual portraits, but did paintings and sketches of scenes which include Ojibwe dwellings, St Louis Bay, and other groupings of Ojibwe in everyday activities.

Eastman Johnson left Wisconsin due to a widespread financial panic, which rendered his real estate investments there worthless.

Eastman Johnson moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to earn money by portrait commissions, and never returned to the subject of the Ojibwe.

Eastman Johnson looks behind her as if worried about pursuers, or wondering what she left behind.

Eastman Johnson placed these people squarely in the foreground and, in doing so, elevated their plight in the national debate.

Eastman Johnson noted at the time that the painting is based on his observations during the Civil War Battle of Manassas.