Johnson, Eastman

Related Category: American Art: Biographies

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.

See study by P. Hills (1972).