`America's Rembrandt' ; Eastman Johnson portrayed social concerns with old-master-style detail
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Visual arts review
"Eastman Johnson: Painting America," Seattle Art Museum, 100 University St., Seattle, through Sept. 10. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays ($7 adults/$5 seniors and students; 206-654-3100).
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Eastman Johnson may not be as big a name in 19th-century American art as Winslow Homer or John Singer Sargent but, as the Seattle Art Museum's new exhibition, "Eastman Johnson: Painting America," demonstrates, he is definitely worth getting to know. In an unusually long life for his time (he died in 1906 at 82), Johnson reflected the coming of age of art in America.
Itinerant portrait sketcher as a young man in New England, he was sent to Germany for formal instruction, fell in love with Rembrandt and Dutch art during four years in the Netherlands, and returned to the U.S. in time to be caught up in the battle against slavery, the subsequent Civil War, the turbulent Reconstruction Era and later Gilded Age.
Drawing on his exposure to cozy Dutch domestic interiors, or "genre" scenes, and Rembrandt's penetrating psychological portraits, Johnson grafted American subject matter onto European old-master models. He became known as "America's Rembrandt" and "the first name among American genre painters," referring to the continental tradition of informal domestic indoor or outdoor scenes with families or groups of people. Novelist and art critic Henry James praised Johnson's "extreme discretion of touch" but found him "essentially homely."
Allow at least one hour to take in all 31 drawings and 66 oils. Ranging from portraits of New England worthies, Native Americans and Washington, D.C., politicians to scenes of slavery and the Civil War, young Johnson's American scene was fresh, adventurous, comparatively exotic, and, above all, socially concerned. Influenced by anti-slavery sentiment in New York, he spent 10 years painting African Americans. These form a crucial show within a show.
Unlike pro-slavery artist William Sidney Mount, Johnson rejected black stereotypes and favored daring images that displayed blacks and whites in integrated social settings, individuals reading or playing music, and, eventually, rides to freedom after the Jan. 1, 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. "Negro Life at the South," 1859, made him famous in New York overnight and set him on a path chronicling slaves and freed men and women until, after the Civil War - like other New York intellectuals and artists - he lost interest, perhaps guilty about the failure to restore full freedom through social integration.
By then, Johnson had married well, acquired a townhouse in Chelsea, joined all the right clubs, and bought a summer house in Nantucket, Mass. Though he shifted his social conscience to painting portraits of wealthy New Yorkers, he also proceeded to create some of his greatest works. Don't miss the long sequence of cranberry harvest paintings, shimmering icons of backbreaking labor and glistening Maine sunlight.
"Catching the Bee," 1872, "Woman in White," 1873, and "Hollyhocks," 1874, anticipate the sun-filled leisure scenes with well-dressed women that the Impressionists would turn to a decade or more later. Johnson's versions are intimate with deft spots of bright color.
There is a restrained drama, like that of James' novels and his wistful heroines. "The Girl I Left Behind Me," 1875, is about as emotional as Johnson gets; a beautiful girl clutches two books and stands alone on a cliff before a raging seaside storm. "Not at Home," 1873, along with other portraits of his wife, Elizabeth, are also mature and powerful.
Not as crisp as Homer or as showy as Sargent, Eastman Johnson has his own strengths: social viewpoint, impeccable technique, and an ability to charm that was essential to Victorian-era painting in America.