Eastman Johnson's 'Negro Life at the South' and urban slavery in Washington, D.C

Johnson in Washington

Although the exact dates are difficult to pinpoint, it appears that during the course of his early career, Eastman Johnson lived in the District of Columbia for a combined period of at least four years, with his several interrupted Washington sojourns spanning a decade and a half, from to 1858. Even when he lived elsewhere - he spent the early 1850s studying abroad, and two subsequent summers were devoted to researching possible Native American subjects in Wisconsin - Washington usually remained his primary residence in the United States until his definitive move to New York in 1858.(5) Johnson was first drawn to the city as a young "black-and-white" artist; following lithographic training in Boston, he moved to the District of Columbia at about the age of twenty. There, he made a living for two years executing highly finished crayon portraits of local and visiting luminaries. Johnson enjoyed privileged access to a number of important political figures in Washington. For a time, he was even permitted to set up a studio in a committee room of the United States Congress, allowing him easy access to such legislators as Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams.

That the inexperienced Eastman Johnson would be granted such opportunities is likely the result of family connections. The artist's father, Philip C. Johnson, was a functionary of the Democratic Party in Maine; he had served for two years as Maine's secretary of state under Governor John Fairfield, his political patron. Fairfield subsequently began a term as a United States senator in 1843, and through his efforts several years later, Philip Johnson was appointed by President James Polk to the office of chief clerk in the Bureau of Construction, Equipment, and Repair of the Navy Department, a midlevel management position (he supervised nine employees), which he held for the rest of his life. Thereafter, the Johnson family resided in Washington, first in a series of boardinghouses and rented spaces and then, as of 1853, in a newly built brick row house at 266 F Street, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets and just a few blocks from the White House and Philip's Navy, Department offices.(6) The purchase of number 266 by Eastman Johnson's parents meant that the artist would have a spacious home to use as a base of operations throughout the 1850s. Johnson, however, had already left Washington in 1846, moving to Boston for three years before embarking on a lengthy campaign of European study, first in Dusseldorf, and then in The Hague and Paris. His student years on the Continent were among the most extensive of any American artist of his generation. In autumn 1855, however, the death of his mother finally brought him home again to Washington. The local National Intelligencer announced shortly thereafter, "It affords us pleasure to announce the return from Europe of the well-known Washington artist, Mr. E. Johnson."(7)

The Washington that greeted Johnson in 1855 had changed significantly from the small town he had first left in 1846. James Renwick's Smithsonian Institution building now graced the Mall, and Clark Mills's bronze equestrian sculpture of Andrew Jackson had recently been installed in Lafayette square. Among many other architectural works-in-progress, huge new wings were under construction at the Capitol; Robert Mills's Washington Monument stood half erected at 170 feet; and Thomas U. Walter had recently begun a campaign to complete Mills's Treasury Building, just a block and a half from the Johnson home. Washington historians remember these years as the first visible maturity of the city; even if its cosmopolitan potential had yet to be fully realized, it was no longer an embarrassingly undeveloped backwater. Accordingly, Johnson seems to have decided to cast his lot, at least for a time, in the capital. Soon he began mining his father's Democratic and naval contacts for portrait commissions, and when the Washington Art Association was founded in 1857, he sent ten works (mainly genre paintings and character studies) to its first exhibition.s Simultaneously, he saw to it that his most important oil paintings were shown in New York and Boston.