The Work of America’s Rembrandt Is as American as Pumpkin Pie

Eastman Johnson’s 200th birthday is this year, and like Thanksgiving, his work fuses God, family, history, and civics.

T hanksgiving is my favorite holiday, mostly for the food. Turkey smothered in gravy with clam stuffing is the triumph of fish and fowl. Very Yankee. Mashed carrots-and-potatoes add color and more comfort. Roasted brussels sprouts, crispy from a last-minute maple syrup drizzle, gooey green bean casserole, chunky cranberry sauce, glazed carrots, and pies. Yum, yum, yum. Yes, I’m thankful, too, for good health and grateful to live in America, which means I’ve won life’s Lotto.

Tasty as Thanksgiving dinner might be, nothing exists in Brian Land without at least a few didactic dimensions, and there’s always room for art. Thanksgiving, of all our national holidays, most overtly fuses God, family, history, and civics. I’ve been wanting to write about Eastman Johnson, the artist whose 200th birthday is this year and who, coincidentally, most overtly fuses God, family, history, and civics. Johnson (1824–1906) was known in his lifetime as America’s Rembrandt for his ocher palette, hushed, Gilded Age parlor scenes, and wistful pictures of rural life. He’s a values artist — American values — and a memories artist, too. There’s not a roasted turkey to be found, or a Pilgrim, a football, or a float in parade formation. He’s still America’s premier Thanksgiving artist.

Nobody’s thinking about gratitude, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie in A Ride for Liberty, from 1862. Johnson’s slave family — father, mother, a child, and a baby — flees for their lives and future toward Union lines near Bull Run. It’s dawn. Bayonets in a row catch the morning light and look like beckoning torches. Father and son look forward. Mother looks back. She less thinks than feels. Is it dread or regret or good riddance or the collywobbles? We don’t know, but likely all of the above. In the loosey-goosey, early days of the war, Johnson, already an established artist and with lots of political connections in Washington, was able to embed himself in the army. He said the scene was his own eyewitness account. Was he really there, seeing the fugitives whiz by? Maybe not, but he makes us feel we’re there, and that’s what matters.

In A Ride for Liberty, Johnson seems to answer at least some of the questions he posed in Negro Life at the South from 1859, the painting that made him famous. It’s set in Washington, a place Johnson knew well. He was born and raised in Maine, but his father was politically prominent there and moved the family to the Swamp for a government job. Much of Johnson’s early work was portraiture. Using Papa Johnson’s Rolodex, he developed a portrait business catering to the antebellum high and mighty.

Negro Life at the South proposes another eyewitness account. A young, well-dressed white woman on the right sneaks a peek at the backyard doings of a black family. There’s a hefty heap of stereotypes. Blacks were seen as unusually musical, so there’s a banjo player and a dancing child. The place is a dump. A hunk of a black man, an axe at his feet, flirts with a light-skinned woman. A very black woman and a light-skinned baby look out a window. Her red headdress and the baby’s yellow and blue clothes grab our eye. What’s next? Even the dog’s poised for new moves. A Ride for Liberty seems to answer the question.

Thanksgiving has multiple and debated histories, and I do think about these. Since this is my column, I get to pick the right one. Thanksgiving’s rooted in the Pilgrim story, to be sure, but mostly it’s a Civil War phenomenon blending humility and triumph, American-style. Yes, the Declaration of Independence — celebrated on July 4 — starts with our rights descending to us from God, not the government, but then it speedily turns to secular specifics like quartering troops, trial by jury, England’s tyrant king, abusive bureaucrats sent to eat out our substance, and taxes. Christmas, Easter, Labor Day, Martin Luther King Day, and other holidays are either political but untethered to civic fundamentals, or they merge religion, family, and commerce and are entirely apolitical. Or they’re just a day off. Bonnets, bunnies, Christmas trees, and hot dogs supplant deep meaning.

Lincoln’s first Thanksgiving Day proclamation in 1863 sets the tone and expresses the zeitgeist in which Johnson worked. It recognizes God’s providence, so extraordinary it penetrates and melts even the most insensitive of hearts. The American plow, shuttle, and axe continue to yield wealth and strength and, diverted to the battlefield, an advancing army and navy. We’ll whip “our national perverseness and disobedience.” Peace, harmony, tranquility, and union are on the way, thanks to God, and don’t you forget it.

Johnson was an abolitionist and a Republican and the first American artist to upend conventional American and European views of blacks as yielding and menial. A Ride for Liberty is a clip from an action movie, but one of my favorite Johnson pictures is Union Soldiers Accepting a Drink, from around 1865. A black woman pours glasses of water for two Union soldiers. Yes, she serves but she’s at the apex of a triangle that subverts racial hierarchies. Flowers and vegetables grow in a brilliant, sunny garden. The apple tree is packed with fruit. Trees and vines cast a cool, comforting shade. The grass is a velvety green, and there’s a pretty blue hill in the distance. In profile in the dark shade is a little black girl. What’s her future? The vibe’s ambiguous but positive.

Johnson’s various, but he always returns to hearth and home, both humble and cozy and posh and prosperous. His drawings are superb, and I think he’s the best American draughtsman of his century. The Field Hospital, from 1867, is lovely, gauzy, and warm, a perfect Victorian work of art, tender and poignant with no suds.

Where’s home? It could be a high-end, city-slicker place like the parlor in The Brown Family, from 1869. Johnson’s bread and butter was Gilded Age portraiture, and this picture’s a portrait of a prosperous family and lifestyle in a post-war age. Or home could be a rural kitchen or a much-missed and much-loved woman.

Johnson, who became a New Yorker and was one of the founders of the Met Museum, was never far from rural life, in his memories of Maine and, starting in the 1870s, in his long, yearly visits to Nantucket. A few months ago, I wrote about Johnson’s maple-sugar-making pictures, the foundation of a small exhibition at the Colby College Museum of Art. These paintings depict sap boiling in rural Maine as well as the community-wide sugaring-off parties when the first batches of maple sugar came hot from the kettles. Today, Johnson’s probably best known for The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket from 1880. It’s a big painting, about four feet wide, and a cinematic hive. I love it for the dappling light bouncing from figure to figure and giving spots of blue, white, and red an electric jolt.

The picture’s about food, and we wouldn’t survive without farmers, but by 1880 we’re well into the machine age. Handpicking cranberries might evoke a simple, communitarian past but, even though it’s set in beautiful Nantucket, it’s more grueling than it looks. Cranberry farming was among the new strategies in Nantucket to replace the collapse of the whaling industry, killed by oil. Johnson first went to Nantucket as a land speculator, hoping to develop a summer tourist economy. He was prescient, though too much so, and painted The Cranberry Harvest in response to a new demand among the bourgeois rich for scenes of country life. It’s less the art of realism than the art of reminiscence.

And what’s wrong with that? Thanksgiving’s a day for remembering people and places. Memory’s a form of magic. What the Shell Says, from 1875, is one of Johnson’s most heartwarming pictures, suggesting the past of old people, a child’s future, and the magic power of a seashell. Winnowing Grain, from the late 1870s, is positively alchemical. The farmer’s separating grain from chaff and looks like he’s in a trance. The grain looks like powdered gold. The process would have been more mechanized by then, but no matter. He’s not a farmer. He’s a shaman. That’s the power of the past.

Even Johnson’s noisiest work has the quality of a religious ritual. A Ride for Liberty, or the scene he said he saw, couldn’t have been quiet. Goodness, it’s a battlefield. The picture is still biblical. Thy Word Is a Lamp unto My Feet, from around 1880, is explicitly religious. It embraces the 119th Psalm in which God’s laws supplant the petty, freakish rules we set for ourselves. It’s a good read. Returning to Lincoln’s proclamation, we understand Thanksgiving as a time for prayerful gratitude. For 300 years, faith moored American civic life. That it doesn’t anymore is our loss.

Johnson, alas, faded in fame, especially in comparison with his contemporary, and more-or-less competitor, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, American Modernism, and the waves of movements that followed. Johnson’s narrative was affecting, never soppy, but for a culture focused on now, now, now as we are, he’s not retro. He’s archaic. Homer’s late seascapes make him modern. Sometimes he and Homer worked on a parallel track. Johnson painted The Old Stagecoach, for instance, in 1871. Homer’s Snap the Whip and other depictions of childhood are later. After the Civil War, as is the case after most wars, there was a baby boom. Art followed demography, making scenes of childhood buoyancy and promise popular subjects. Johnson’s are better, clearer, and more fun. Homer’s kids sometimes look weird, cold, and out of it. Eakins’s portraits ooze angst.

Johnson’s work is dark but not sinister, composed but not combustible. He did drama, but he didn’t do psycho. Though he was called America’s Rembrandt, he’s thoroughly American. Though he never fully disappeared from the canon of our best artists, over the last 30 years or so, he’s had what I think is a permanent revival.

On a secular front, I like writing about Eastman Johnson in part because I’ve been involved in his catalogue raisonné for years. A catalogue raisonné is the ultimate endurance sport in art history. It’s a catalogue, or compendium, of everything an artist has done. This sounds obvious and easy but it isn’t. Johnson’s lifetime production is 900 paintings and 400 drawings. Over the course of 50 years, Patricia Hills, a professor emerita at Boston University, has traced almost all of them, with the management and authorial prowess of Abigael MacGibeny and occasional advice from a three-member vetting committee of Marc Simpson, Linda Ferber, and me. People write to us for our opinions when they think they’ve found a lost Johnson picture. We’re the old guard currently among historians of American art.

A catalogue raisonné not only identifies each and every object. It traces its provenance, location, exhibition history, and bibliography. Since these evolve, it’s an organic rather than static proposition. It also illustrates most everything. The older catalogues raisonnés are printed, which means they’re outdated the moment a new article is published, a new show opens, or, and this happens, a new work is discovered in someone’s attic or under someone’s bed. The Eastman Johnson catalogue raisonné is online so it can be updated and, of course, accessed easily and at no cost. I think the Winslow Homer catalogue raisonné, at four volumes, is $500.

Catalogues raisonnés are essential for dealers, auction houses, scholars, and serious collectors. I think they’re fun to read. The one for John Singer Sargent is, I think, ten volumes and sumptuously illustrated. I look at it as lifestyles of the rich, famous, and execrable since he painted so many of the stars of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Catalogues raisonnés take years as well as a deep interest in connoisseurship and exactitude and a doughty character. I’m not sure there are many younger art historians who want to do this kind of work, or can.

Johnson painted lots of portraits of America’s Gilded Age heavy hitters as well as scenes of everyday life, which Sargent rarely painted. The National Academy of Design hosts the Eastman Johnson catalogue raisonné, ensuring it’ll stay a living thing after we are no longer thus.

So happy birthday, Eastman Johnson, and Happy Thanksgiving. On Saturday, I’ll write my monthly “in the news” story, fueled by leftovers.