Eastman Johnson

Eastman Johnson 1824-1906, American portrait and genre painter, b. Lovell, Maine. He studied with a lithographer in Boston and later in Düsseldorf, then for almost four years at The Hague, where he was greatly influenced by the 17th-century Dutch masters. In 1855 Johnson returned to the United States and in 1860 settled in New York City. His fame rests primarily upon his skillfully executed genre pictures, such as Old Kentucky Home (N.Y. Public Lib.) and Corn Husking at Nantucket (Metropolitan Mus.). After 1885, however, he devoted himself to portraiture. Among his sitters were Presidents Hayes, Cleveland, and Harrison, as well as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Emerson, and Longfellow.

Bibliography: See study by P. Hills (1972).

Johnson, Eastman (b Lovell, Me., 29 July 1824; d New York, 5 Apr. 1906). American painter and printmaker. He spent his early career in Boston (where he trained as a lithographer) and Washington, then from 1848 to 1855 studied in Europe—in Düsseldorf, The Hague, and Paris. After his return to the USA he worked in various places before settling in New York in 1859. He spent a good deal of time in rural areas, and his best pictures are generally thought to be his outdoor genre scenes, which are vigorous and fresh in observation (Cranberry Harvest, 1880, Timken AG, San Diego). In his later career he devoted himself mainly to fashionable portraiture, with which he earned a handsome living.