Johnson took his sketch pad with him to the Civil War, following the Union Army not unlike a modern photojournalist. The most famous outcome of this five-year sojourn was his oil painting, The Wounded Drummer Boy.
During the next twenty years, Eastman Johnson became a Regionalist Realist painter, keeping himself to the East Coast and creating his most memorable works. He settled into a routine of venturing back to boyhood haunts in Fryeburg, Maine and made regular summer visits to Nantucket. He married Elizabeth Buckley in 1869 and fathered a daughter, Ethel Eastman Johnson in 1870. Many of his most charming works are of his wife and child in and around their home.
Johnson recognised something in the East that gave him comfort and there is an undercurrent of contentment in all his genre paintings of this period of his work. When not traipsing off after the Army of the Potomac throughout the 1860s, he travelled to New England. After seeing up close the destruction of war, the comfortable semi-antiquity of his homeland must have come as a relief. Since so many young men were in uniform during the war years and many didn’t come back from the battles he was left with the elderly and women and young people who were not of conscription age as his subjects. Where no people were present in his pictures, the tools they used and the interiors that sheltered them showed use and degrees of decay. They lacked a swab of whitewash or a few stones in the wall or the hearth blackened dark with soot, or a cane chair seat needing a fresh weave.
One of his most successful genre paintings was Corn Husking, exhibited in 1861 at the National Academy of Design in New York. The show opened just three weeks before the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the start of the Civil War. No less than the 200,000 New Yorkers crowded into Union Square to support the Union cause, and Johnson had made his own pro-Union statement in this painting. Written on the barn door are the words “Lincoln and Hamlin” referring to Lincoln’s successful run for the presidency and his running mate from Maine, Hannibal Hamlin. New England had come out in strength for the Republican ticket during the election so the painting was as much a subtle political broadside as it was an example of fine art.
He never felt the need to fall back upon the historical ‘Down Easters’, the Puritans in knee britches or the old coaches that plied the roads. Except for his Old Stage Coach painting he sketched in pieces and then assembled in his studio. It depicts the ruin of stage coachwork without wheels or axles being reclaimed by the local vegetation and workings of the elements. But even this lamentable reminder of days past is rejuvenated by the shouts and whoops of children as they play around and upon the disintegrating shell. Boys whinny and gallop in place while drivers snap whips made of air and imagination and the girls peer out of the windows at the passing scene. All this action by the side of the road takes place under late afternoon sun and is so unforced and natural that it is impossible to imagine this captured moment was created in a studio from bits and pieces and assembled in Johnson’s mind.
All this rural hoopla fitted in with the trend that had citizens returning to their roots during and after the Civil War, paying homage to the old, uncomplicated days so prominent in imprecise memory. Books, plays, artwork all celebrated the ‘good old days’ unencumbered by the industrial revolution, crowded cities, smoke-belching steam locomotives, and the stink of a hundred backyard privies on a hot summer night. Coal gas hissing into the lamps in overstuffed apartments. The reek of crowds layered in Victorian fashion moving in clouds of scent to mask the odour of their unwashed bodies. The paintings promised open vistas, big spaces, dense forests and winding brooks, the warm dry smell of hay in a feed barn and the splashing rumble of a mill wheel in the river race.
Making use of his years studying Rembrandt’s use of light in etchings and oil paintings, Johnson infused his works with sophisticated views, particularly with the interiors. He evoked mood and the rough-hewn lives of Americans of all walks of life. He bestowed grace and charm on the most mundane subjects.
Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West travelling show to cities and towns after touring the capitals of Europe and performing before the Imperial Royals. But his enactments of cowboy and Indian mock battles and the skills of his bronco busters, sharpshooters and ropers lost relevance as the real West began to disappear. The land was still there, but railways, the telegraph and hordes of settlers transformed the face of it. What had been news stories of Custer’s Last Stand, the Battle of Wounded Knee, land and gold rushes became nostalgia and slipped from newspaper headlines to memories swapped on shady porches in the cool of the evening.
Genre paintings slipped from favour. Johnson fell back upon his portraits for income but, like the old men seated around the stove in the general store, he reached back into his own memories. He had, for instance, a great desire to produce a large canvas depicting the process of maple sugar boiling. Over the years he made a number of studies of this unique ‘Down East’ scene, but never completed the finished canvas as interest in nostalgia waned. His fame as a portrait artist never vanished and he was in constant demand. Even into his seventies, he remained active, documenting both his era and the images in his memory.
Of the series, Henry T. Tuckerman, Boston essayist and critic, explained Johnson’s ability to capture “Maine, of old… rare materials… becoming more rare and less picturesque as locomotive facilities reduce costume, dress, speech and even faces to a monotonous uniformity.”[2]
By 1880, Johnson focused more and more on his portrait work. Around him, the nation was changing rapidly as industry, transportation and communications evolved, making the crusty, dusty antiquity of Maine memories even less relevant. There were few artists still around who had begun their careers before the Civil War, and of that diminishing group, he remained in public favour. Right up until his death at the age of eighty-two on 5 April 1906, he was considered a popular pioneer for realism that reflected the American scene using Old World techniques, but filtered through the flint-sharp sensibilities of a true Yankee ‘Down Easter’.
Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves, c. 1862.
Oil on paper board, 55.8 × 66.4 cm.
The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, gift of Miss Gwendolyn O. L. Conkling.
Winslow Homer (1836–1910)
Winslow Homer, Prisoners from the Front, 1866.
Oil on canvas, 61 × 96.5 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, gift of Mrs. Frank B. Porter.
Almost a generation behind Eastman Johnson, Winslow Homer, also a largely self-taught artist, carried forward Johnson’s gift of portraying the American scene and added a love of the sea to the rustic genre images. He was born on 24 February 1836 in Boston, Massachusetts to Henrietta Benson and Charles Savage Homer. Henrietta grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she learned the art of watercolour. She was an active amateur painter and went on to exhibit with her son at the Boston Art Association in the 1870s.[3] His mother became Winslow’s first teacher.
An even greater influence on his early art training was the legendary Boston romantic painter, Washington Allston (1779–1843). Though he made two trips to Europe, studying various salon painters including the British artist, Benjamin West, Allston became a leading figure in the early nineteenth-century Romantic Movement in America. His emphasis was on landscape, but he concentrated more on mood and emotion than observation of an actual scene. His skills also extended