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Eastman Johnson's portrait of aging New England

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Teresa A. Carbone

In recent decades cultural historians have probed deeply into the complex meanings of New England for post-Civil War generations of Americans.(1) The artist Eastman Johnson is included regularly in such studies because his roots were in rural Maine and he held fast to a New England identity even after a successful stay in Europe and residence in New York City over the course of nearly fifty years.

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As a critic commented in a review of a memorial exhibition of Johnson's work a year after his death: "Maine or Nantucket, the painter all his life remained an unmistakable 'Down Easter,' in his outward way and modes of speech, as well as in his ways of thinking and in his shrewd and humorous outlook on life."(2) Johnson claimed his New England identity primarily through his subject matter, which he sought in Maine throughout the 1860s and in Nantucket, Massachusetts, during annual sojourns from 1870. The reception of his mature New England paintings was shaped in part by his earliest production - fine crayon portraits of Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne, among others, in their prime. With such ties to a group of New England's greatest pre-Civil War thinkers and writers, Johnson bore the imprimatur of historical privilege throughout his career.

Johnson's works, most frequently cited for their suggestion of a bygone New England, are less about identifiable locales than generalized interiors. The hearths and worn plaster walls are distinctive for their sparse, emblematic details and air of authentic but benign decay. He peopled these interiors with a cast of aging New England types. Rejecting Puritans in costume or colonial spinners,(3) he chose age alone to evoke a past that lingered in the declining population of his time. His canvases of the 1860s portray the elderly figures in a traditional family structure, signifying the spiritual discipline and industriousness on which New England culture was founded. By the 1870s he tended toward a more unencumbered vision of maturity modeled on the aging male population of Nantucket. In those compelling works he recorded the physical decline and psychological isolation that paralleled the waning of a regional way of life.

Johnson introduced the old New Englander into his work in the summer of 1860, when he returned to his childhood home of Fryeburg, Maine, to paint the surviving features of rural life.(4) He may have been inspired by the pro-Union art critic for the Knickerbocker, who exhorted: "Be true to the indigenous poesy of the soil which cherishes you."(5)

Johnson's Corn Husking (Pl. VII) was exhibited at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1861, which opened three weeks before the bombardment of Fort Sumter and was still running when nearly two hundred thousand New Yorkers rallied in Union square in support of the Union cause. Johnson's inclusion of the inscription "Lincoln and Hamlon" on the barn door in Corn Husking is a reference to Lincoln's running mate in 1860, Hannibal Hamlin (1809-1891) of Maine. In this way he recorded New England's early alignment with the Republican cause, for Lincoln won a clear majority in Maine, whereas New York City voted overwhelmingly for the anti-Republican fusion ticket.

Johnson's subsequent production of what he called "Down east"(6) scenes was dominated by his effort to produce a large and profitable canvas on the theme of maple sugaring, which he never painted despite producing preparatory figure studies. Having viewed the series of studies, Henry T. Tuckerman (1813-1871) praised Johnson for capturing

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.(7)

The self-conscious retrospective subject matter of the visual arts after mid-century followed on the heels of a literary movement that attempted to reanimate the customs, dialects, and details of regional societies in decline. The early novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) began the trend, which steadily gained momentum during the war years.(8) More than one artist heeded critics such as the Knickerbocker writer who urged the cultivation of a "domestic nationality":

Artists! yield not up the sacred heirloom committed to your charge for a mess of pottage; remember that your eloquent brushes are recording the history of a nation.(9)

Johnson completed his most expansive statements of "domestic nationality" after the close of the war, when, as one writer commented, it was possible to "realize the beneficial effects of this wholesome electric shock upon national art."(10) With Sunday Morning (Pl. X) Johnson offered to a shaken society the sober vision of piety in the New England setting that many Union supporters had invoked as a repository of the nation's moral underpinnings. The preindustrial kitchen, which became ubiquitous in American painting after 1876, already figured in Johnson's Kitchen at Mount Vernon of 1859.(11) His New England Kitchen of 1863 to 1866 (in a private collection) provided the specific details for the more elaborate statement of a kitchen in Sunday Morning. He drew these tenebrous interiors from the rustic realism of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, which he had studied closely in The Hague.

Eastman Johnson's portrait of aging New England

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Teresa A. Carbone

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