Detail View: Visual Resources Teaching Collection: What the Shell Says (Girl with Grandfather)

aahi0000458

What the Shell Says (Girl with Grandfather)

full view

1875

creation

Eastman Johnson (American, 1824-1906)

male

American painter and printmaker. Between 1840 and 1842 he was apprenticed to the Boston lithographer John H. Bufford (1810–70). His mastery of this medium is apparent in his few lithographs, of which the best known is Marguerite (c. 1865–70; Worcester, MA, Amer. Antiqua. Soc.). In 1845 he moved to Washington, DC, where he drew portraits in chalk, crayon and charcoal of prominent Americans, including Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams and Dolly Madison (all 1846; Cambridge, MA, Fogg). In 1846 he settled in Boston and brought his early portrait style to its fullest development. His chiaroscuro charcoal drawings, of exceptional sensitivity, were remarkably sophisticated for an essentially self-trained artist. In 1848 he travelled to Europe to study painting at the Düsseldorf Akademie. During his two-year stay he was closely associated with Emanuel Leutze, and painted his first genre subjects, for example The Counterfeiters (c. 1851–5; New York, IBM Corp.). He then spent three years in The Hague, studying colour, composition and naturalism in 17th-century Dutch painting. The influence of the Dutch masters on his portrait style was so great that he was called 'the American Rembrandt'. In 1855, after two months in Thomas Couture's Paris studio, he returned to America. He then turned his attention to American subject-matter. He made studies of Indians in Wisconsin, and painted portraits while in Washington (e.g. George Shedden Riggs, c. 1855; Baltimore, Mus. & Lib. MD Hist.) and Cincinnati. He finally settled in New York. Johnson's painting Old Kentucky Home—Life in the South (1859; New York, NY Hist. Soc.) established his reputation and led to his painting a series of sympathetic depictions of American blacks. His Cornhusking (1860; Syracuse, NY, Everson Mus. A.), depicting a barn interior, was the culmination of a genre tradition popularized a generation earlier by William Sidney Mount. Between 1861 and 1865 he painted subjects relating to the Civil War, often with a degree of sentimentality or melodrama rarely found in his other works, for example Ride for Liberty—The Fugitive Slaves (c. 1862; New York, Brooklyn Mus.). His most original works of the 1860s were an extensive series of paintings, oil sketches and drawings made annually in late winter, near Fryeburg, ME, on the subject of life in the maple sugar camps, for example Sugaring Off (c. 1861–6; Providence, RI Sch. Des., Mus. A.). In contrast to these freely brushed studies of rural life there were several less painterly depictions of the wealthy in rich urban interiors. Among the finest is the Hatch Family (1871; New York, Met.), an elaborate conversation piece set in the Eastlake-style library of the family's Park Avenue, New York, mansion. Following his marriage in 1869, Johnson spent each summer on Nantucket Island, MA. While there he developed two of his most complex and successful genre subjects, each preceded by numerous oil sketches and studies that show his heightened interest in the naturalistic depiction of outdoor light: Cornhusking Bee (1876; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.) and Cranberry Harvest (1880; San Diego, CA, Timken A.G.; see fig.). With their studies and variants, these two works represent Johnson's best achievements as a painter of figures in complex relationship to each other and their environment. In the mid-1880s demand for his genre subjects decreased and perhaps a gradual decline in his powers made him return almost exclusively to portraiture. Earlier in the decade he had painted some successful characterizations, including the artist Sanford Robinson Gifford (1880) and the double portrait of Johnson's brother-in-law, Robert Rutherford, and the artist Samuel W. Rowse (1822–91) entitled the Funding Bill (1881; both New York, Met.). These vigorously brushed likenesses with their dramatic contrasts of light and shade are in the sombre, Rembrandtesque palette Johnson used for portraits. Some have since darkened further from his use of bitumen in areas of shadow. A good example of his later portraits is his Self-portrait (see Hills, 1972, p. 116), which depicts him in 17th-century Dutch costume. He painted little after the early 1890s and his visits to Europe in 1885, 1891 and 1897 had no evident effect on his style, which in composition, colour, light and draughtsmanship, especially in scenes of rural life in Maine and Nantucket, is unsurpassed in American 19th-century painting. (Grove Art Online Accessed 2006-07-26)

19th century

play (recreation)

genre

elderly

children (people by age group)

families (kinship groups)

oil paintings

paintings (visual works)

paintings

oil on canvas

53.7 cm (H) x 41.3 cm (W)

M.H. De Young Memorial Museum

repository

1979.7.64

accession

San Francisco, California

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