Few artistic avenues could sound drearier than genre paintings. But when one looks upon them as documentaries, suddenly scenes of commonplace life become windows into worlds that still exist, largely unchanged, in many parts of the world. Maine native Eastman Johnson was America’s master of the close study of the modest and the homely, of people in the midst of seemingly small-bore agrarian episodes. A grizzled farmer patiently shells corn as a child seated at his feet stacks the discarded cobs like Lincoln Logs. The weary workers of a maple-sugar camp are captured at a moment of end-of-day merriment as the smoke of a nearby fire befogs the twilight air. A youth in a cap dawdles amid a thawing early spring landscape, a tumble of half-sawn logs at his back. Eastman Johnson and Maine, a bicentennial-birthday exhibition at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville—surprisingly, it is the first Johnson salute ever organized in his home state—gathers more than a dozen scenes that were painted in the 1860s and 1870s by this artist, statesman, and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Executed in amber tones electrified by brighter tints, such as the acid green of newly cut hay and the coral of a young girl’s pinafore, Johnson’s genre paintings were strongly influenced by a European sojourn from 1849 to 1855 that introduced him to the luminous domestic oeuvre of seventeenth-century Dutch artists, both major and minor. Echoes of that immersion swiftly showed up in his canvases, leading an admirer in The Hague to rhapsodize over “the American Rembrandt.” So favored was the young artist that Dutch monarch William III tried, in vain, to get him to settle down and take up a position as court painter. Back in the United States, Johnson would be feted by society queens and robber barons, who snatched up his small-scale yet hugely popular canvases, hanging them amid Courbets and Millets as patriotic evidence that European genre specialists had an American equal. “One of the most effective of our native painters in genre is not an élève of the modern French school, but seems to have divined for himself a special aptitude for the naïve and characteristic,” The International Studio observed in 1868, “and, what is more desirable, [he has] recognized in American life the resources of a department of art previously too much neglected”—meaning salts of the earth engaged in manual labor in an increasingly industrialized age.
In the last two decades of his life, as genre paintings became unfashionable, Johnson turned his brush to stately portraits, which were favorably compared to the likenesses wrought by Gilbert Stuart and John Singer Sargent. Many of them are indeed quite fine in technique and invariably dignified in presentation, but, en masse, would make a showcase of unimagined tedium. The Colby College Museum of Art’s retrospective makes brilliantly clear that it is Johnson’s storytelling paintings that, of all his creations, linger in one’s mind: hushed, approachable, and unmistakably ennobling.
Eastman Johnson and Maine • Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine • to December 8 • colby.edu
