Jonathan Eastman Johnson was a late nineteenth-century painter who depicted, in this order, historical narratives, endearing genre scenes of children, and portraits. He benefited from study abroad in such typical places as Düsseldorf and Paris, but more unusual was the period of several years he spent in The Hague. His detailed portrayal of individuals and careful rendering of light led to his nickname, The American Rembrandt.
Johnson was born in Lovell, Maine, near the border with New Hampshire, and grew up in nearby Fryeburg, and later in Augusta, the state capital, after his father was appointed secretary of state. In 1840, when he was around sixteen, Johnson served as an apprentice to a lithographer in Boston. Four years later he moved to Washington, DC, where his father had accepted a position as the chief clerk in the bureau of construction, a department of the Navy. The young artist supported himself by drawing crayon portraits of such important individuals as Dolly Madison and John Quincy Adams. He returned to Boston in 1846 and three years later departed for Germany where he studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In early 1851 the noted history painter Emmanuel Leutze accepted Johnson as a student; William Washington was also a student during this time period. That same year Johnson visited the Universal Exposition in London (known as the Crystal Palace) prior to settling in The Hague for over three years. While there he studied Dutch and Flemish old masters before relocating to Paris in 1855 to study with Thomas Couture. This interlude was brief and he was back in the States by the end of that year.
During 1856 and 1857, with the assistance of a guide of Ojibwe and African American descent, he explored the northernmost reaches of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan by way of Lake Superior. A number of realistic multi-figure paintings resulted from these adventures. By 1859, Johnson had a studio in New York, and exhibited his signature painting Negro Life at the South (also known by its popular title, Old Kentucky Home) at the National Academy of Design. Johnson painted several other canvases concerned with racial themes and during the Civil War he followed the Union Army making sketches. His popularity grew with the completion of group portraits of prominent families.
At age fifty-five Johnson married for the first time and soon had a daughter who may have inspired a set of genre paintings of children. Like Winslow Homer who painted similar subjects, this post-war focus on innocent youth may reflect an implicit wish for a return to happier times. Around this time the art critic Russell Sturges Jr. gave Johnson high praise: “A collection of Mr. Johnson’s pictures would probably be more interesting to visit than one of any other American painter. His work, taken together, is more truly representative of his countrymen. … There is no painter, not even among the younger men who are just coming into sight from behind the horizon, who get on faster, or who leave the past of a year or two back more decidedly and forever behind.” Along with Sturgis, Johnson served on the organizing committee for the Metropolitan Museum of Art which was charged with the establishment of “An amply endowed, thoroughly constructed institution, free alike from bungling government officials and from the control of a single individual.”
Johnson concluded his distinguished career as a portraitist of notable people, thus securing not only a healthy income, but a reputation that would not be undermined when a change of taste arrived in the last decades of the century. His portraits, as well as his genre compositions, are consistently realistic without being too sentimental. With their tendency to have figures set against dark backgrounds his paintings display the lasting influence of the old masters whom he had studied in The Hague.