Catalogue Entry
Johnson’s early art training included working in a Boston lithography shop, and hence he knew how to draw on the stone before paper was laid over it and printed. In The Hague, where numerous lithography shops were at his disposal, several of his portraits were executed as lithographs. —PH
MacGibeny and Hills, 2022: Having trained briefly in a lithography shop in Boston as a teenager in the early 1840s, and producing lithographs of the Folsom family in the Hague in the early 1850s, Johnson demonstrated continued interest in using the medium as he became a firmly established painter in New York. In previous scholarship, this lithograph was the only recorded lithograph prior to the gifts of the Folsom lithographs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published a part of his play Faust in 1790. The full play, in two parts, was published in 1808. Gretchen (short for Margarete) is the heroine. Gretchen am Spinnrade, or Little Margaret at the Spinning Wheel, is an 1814 musical piece by Schubert. Michel Carré wrote the play Faust et Marguerete in 1859, based on Goethe’s Faust, Part I. Carré’s play was immediately adapted to the 1859 opera by Charles Gounod, with Jules Barbier writing the libretto.
The Evening Post, "Art Items," June 11, 1860: "The first number of ‘The Porte Crayon,’ published by George Ward Nichols, of this city, is just out. It contains four artistically executed lithographs of pictures by Eastman Johnson, George L. Brown, [Geroge] Inness and [Albert Fitch] Bellows. This publication differs from L’Artiste Contemporaires, the Paris serial that has given us such graphic renderings of the pictures of great French masters, in that the artists here makes [sic] the drawings on the stone themselves. This is a unique and desirable work of art, and should have a large sale."
The Crayon, May 1860, advertisement for Crayon Art Gallery: “The first number of the new serial called the Porte Crayon, is now before the public, containing: MARGUERITE, originally painted and now drawn on the stone by EASTMAN JOHNSON…”
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