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

4. This record, as reconstructed in 20th-century scholarship, has relied repeatedly and exclusively on the same two or three period reviews first quoted by Hills. Thus, much of our received wisdom on this important painting derives from a relatively narrow selection of contemporary press notices. Martin, for example, goes so far as to claim that reviews were "limited in number and content" (13). In contrast, I have located over twenty discussions of the painting in the literature of the period, a variety of responses that expands in many ways our knowledge of the reception of Johnson's image.

5. The best published sources on Johnson's years in Washington are Hills, 24-25, 45-56; Hildegard Cummings, "Eastman Johnson and Horatio Bridge," Bulletin of the William Benton Museum of Art 1 (1975-76): 17-32; Arthur S. Marks, "Eastman Johnson's Portrait of James Cochran Dobbin," SECAC Review 10, no. 3 (1983): 138-43; and especially, Andrew J. Cosentino and Henry H. Glassie, The Capital Image: Painters in Washington, 1800-1915 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 94-97.

6. Washington city directories published sporadically between 1846 and 1860 give information on the addresses of Philip Johnson, as well as the staff roster of his office and his starting annual salary of $1,400. The archives of the District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds office indicate that Philip Johnson purchased the east portion of lot 2, square 253 (266 F Street) for $1,279.75 on Oct. 11, 1852 (Liber 48, p. 23). District tax records show that a house valued at $4,200 was erected on the lot sometime in 1853 (Washington, D.C., National Archives, Record Group 351, entry 47, District of Columbia Tax Books).

7. National Intelligencer, Nov. 30, 1855 (typescript in E. P. Richardson files, National Museum of American Art Library, Washington, D.C.).

8. On his portraits during this period, see Cummings (as in n. 5); and Marks (as in n. 5). For his works exhibited with the Washington Art Association, see James L. Yarnall and William H. Gerdts, comps., The National Museum of American Art's Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogues (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 1942-46. In 1858 he was chosen a director of the association.

9. Mary Washington James was first identified in William Walton, "Eastman Johnson, Painter," Scribner's Magazine 40 (Sept. 1906): 264. Genealogical information on her family line is given in "Family Records: From the Bible of Mrs. Sarah Washington," William and Mary College Quarterly 10 (Oct. 1901): 113.

10. Johnson to Mrs. Doud, Dec. 12, 1895, quoted in American 18th, 19th and 20th Century Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors and Sculpture, sale cat., Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, Dec. 12, 1975, 23A. Interestingly, a later painting that fits Johnson's description, Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon, 1784 (1859, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) was jointly executed by Louis Remy Mignot and Thomas Rossiter; it is insightfully discussed by Katherine E. Manthorne in The Landscapes of Louis Remy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad, exh. cat., North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 1996, 112-17. In particular, Manthorne examines the motives of the Southern-sympathizing Mignot in creating a canvas that, unlike Negro Life at the South, presents an unambiguously positive depiction of the master-slave relationship.