During the 1860s Johnson painted Black men, women, and children that bestow on them dignity, intelligence, and grace. Many in his family, including his sister Harriet May and her husband Reverend Joseph May were ardent abolitionists. To Johnson, Blacks were not subjects to be ridiculed or satirized. —PH
Hills, 2021: Winslow Homer also did genre paintings of women blowing on horns to call the men working in the fields back to lunch. It was Johnson, however, who depicted Black women at this task. This painting closely matches the description of Johnson's painting Union Soldiers Accepting a Drink (Carnegie Museum of Art), except that the Black woman in the latter is one of four figures and she is pouring from a bottle into a glass instead of blowing on a dinner horn.
Although John I. H. Baur owned and annotated a copy of the catalogue of Johnson's 1907 Estate Sale, he did not include this work in his own 1940 catalogue listing; he must have obtained it after publication.
"Height, 22 inches; length, 25 ½ inches"
[Annotation: “75.00”]
- Subject matter: