American Realism. Gerry Souter

the 1840s, the United States was still a work in progress. Its population had leaped 33 per cent from the previous decade to 17,063,353 with four states exceeding one million residents: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia. Texas signed up for annexation in 1845 and the first immigrant wagon trains headed west over the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails. In December of that same year, President James K. Polk told Congress it was the country’s “manifest destiny” to pursue expansion west and vigorously uphold the Monroe Doctrine.

      These great events were just beginning to be communicated across the country by Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph, proven on 24 May 1844 with a message sent from Washington D. C. to Baltimore, Maryland that read, “What God hath wrought”. A somewhat less momentous event was taking place in a Boston studio as a twenty-year-old Eastman Johnson struggled to learn the mechanics of crayon and gum arabic in the art of stone lithography. This was journeyman work, a profession in the printing industry and his father had apprenticed him to the studio by to learn a useful trade.

      Young Johnson was born in 1824, in Lovell, a small town near Maine’s western border, the last of eight children born to Mary Kimball Chandler to Phillip Carrigan Johnson. Following Eastman’s sisters, Harriet, Judith, Mary, Sarah, Nell and his brother Reuben, he was also well down the line from first-born, Commodore Phillip Carrigan Johnson Jr. As the family moved from Lovell to Fryeburg, a former frontier outpost in 1762, and to Augusta, Maine’s capital city on the Kennebec River, the patriarch Johnson climbed the ladder of success. From being a successful businessman he ascended to the post of Maine’s Secretary of State and eventually moved on up to influence in Washington D. C. as Chief Clerk of the Bureau of Construction, Equipment and Repair of the U. S. Navy. It wasn’t difficult to obtain an apprenticeship; Eastman’s gift for drawing and observation made the job a good fit.

      At the age of twenty-one Eastman moved to Washington D. C. in 1845 and established himself as a portraitist, eventually producing images of such notables as orator Daniel Webster and Dolly Madison, wife of President James Madison. Moving on to Boston the following year, his subtle use of line and tone learned at the stone soon brought him portrait commissions such as the likeness of a youthful Charles Sumner commissioned by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

      The famed poet gave Eastman’s career a considerable boost with requested drawings of Longfellow’s influential friends and family, including poet Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anne Longfellow Pierce, Charles Longfellow, Ernest Longfellow, Mary Longfellow Greenleaf and Cornelius Conway Felton, soon to be president of Harvard University. Johnson worked in Boston for three years, but he felt he needed more training in the fine arts. It was not until 1848 that he created his first oil painting, a portrait of his grandmother.

      In 1849, Johnson travelled across the Atlantic to Germany and enrolled in the Düsseldorf Academy, an influential realist school created in the early nineteenth century. He was accepted into the studio of the American expatriate artist, Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. While the school was noted for its painters who turned out realist landscape allegories and historical subjects, just before Johnson arrived many of its students had been politically involved in social protest, manning the barricades as part of the Burgwehr citizen army. The revolution of 1848–49 forced Frederick William IV to grant a constitution uniting the Prussian States into a single entity. Eastman joined a number of American artists who passed through this school, which at the time was more influential than anything happening in Paris. George Caleb Bingham, Worthington Whittredge, Richard Caton Woodville, William S. Haseltine, James M. Hart, and William Morris Hunt all passed through Düsseldorf as well as the painter of luminescent western landscapes, Albert Bierstadt.

      While the academy offered considerable technical training, Johnson felt restricted by the pedagogy and in 1852 packed up his paints and brushes and toured Italy and France, finally ending up in The Hague in Holland. His goal there was to study seventeenth-century Dutch artists, specifically Rembrandt and that artist’s brilliant use of light and composition. His work was so well received that he was offered the post of court painter, which he refused. Johnson had come to a decision that realist art was not tied to populist allegories, drenching sentimentality or forced re-enactments of historical events. Painting could tell both simple and complex stories without bogus emotion or flights of fancy. Direct observation in the field, activities sketched from life, all these acquisitions could render the American lifestyle in the American landscape. Armed with Rembrandt’s methods of visualisation, the rigorous curricula of German technique and his own sensitivity to story telling, Eastman Johnson spent two months in academician Thomas Couture’s Paris studio, and in 1855 he departed for the United States. The American art scene that greeted his arrival was considerably different from when he had left just seven years previously. Daguerreotype salons had sprouted like mushrooms on a log – especially in Washington. The fashionable one-of-a-kind photographic portraits in their velvet and gutta-percha clamshell frames became the rage as carte de visite leave-behinds and commemorative gifts. Sadly, the faces that peered back were mostly severe in expression due to the often three-minute exposures, while the head was securely kept in place by a clamp. Even so, the market for crayon portraits had crashed. Still, his reputation and fine work kept him in portrait commissions in Cincinnati and Washington, and finally funded his studio when he settled in New York.

      Another major change was Americans’ attitudes to art and its place in their society. In the 1840s everything European was considered the definition of good taste and enlightened sensibilities. Now, in the 1850s, Americans began to turn inward and seek their own identities in art and letters. The nation’s vistas were expanding and in the East and Midwest those who bought paintings wanted scenes of the exotic Far West. People who lived in teeming cities longed for idealised views of bucolic farm life and recreation in the forests and along country roads, images of simple lives led in the Deep South and even among the Plains Indians.

      Eastman Johnson, The Hatch Family, c. 1870–1871.

      Oil on canvas, 121.9 × 186.4 cm.

      The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, gift of Frederic H. Hatch.

      Eastman Johnson, Negro Life at the South, 1859.

      Oil on canvas, 91.4 × 114.9 cm.

      Robert L. Stuart Collection, New York Historical Society, New York, New York.

      Eastman Johnson, Corn Husking, 1860.

      Oil on canvas, 67.3 × 76.8 cm.

      Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, gift of Andrew D. White.

      Eastman Johnson, Cranberry Pickers, c. 1879.

      Oil on paper board, 57.1 × 67.9 cm.

      Private collection.

      It was Johnson’s good luck to have his sister, Sarah, marry William Henry Newton, who took his bride up to property investments he had made in the upper Midwest. Johnson’s brother, Reuben, had also moved up north to Superior, Wisconsin and opened a sawmill. Having kin already established in that distant country motivated Johnson to journey into the wilderness armed with cash from his portrait sittings and a loan from his father to invest in land. The summers of 1856 and 1857 were spent working with brush and crayon around western Lake Superior and in a cabin he built on Pokegema Bay.

      He enlisted the services of a guide, Stephen Boonga, a mixed-blood African-American and Ojibwe Native-American man, to help him build a canoe and paddle to the Apostle Islands and the cities of Duluth and Superior. In Grand Portage, Johnson made contact with the Ojibwe tribes and made a number of sketches in charcoal and oil.[1]

      In 1859, Johnson reached back into his Düsseldorf training and created his first American genre painting titled Life in the South (aka: The Deep South, Negro Life at the South & Old Kentucky Home). On close examination, he did not reach too far. The painting is largely

1

Eastman Johnson, Paintings and Drawings of the Lake Superior Ojibwe,Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth, October 29, 2006 (http://www.d.umn.edu/tma)