In addition to his scenes of everyday life and portraits of people, Johnson created images of historical events and figures from works of literature, drama, and music. For example, “Carry Me, and I’ll Drum You Through” was inspired by an incident from the Battle of Antietam, 1862, and Membership Vote at the Union League Club, May 11, 1876, recorded a contentious meeting in which he participated much later. His Marguerite, Cosette, and Minnehaha are personifications of fictional heroines from novels and poetry. His Boy Lincoln represents both the future United States president and the archetypical American youth who, with determination and hard work, could succeed. Johnson rendered several of these imaginative images as both paintings and drawings. These literary and historical works evince both his personal interest in those subjects and his awareness of their popularity with the broad public. —AM
MacGibeny, 2022: Inspired by an event from the Battle of Antietam, which was fought on September 17, 1862, Johnson made three drawings and six paintings on the theme of the wounded drummer boy between 1863 and 1871.
William T. Blodgett led other Centurions in the purchase and gift of this drawing to the Century Association, of which Johnson also was a member, in 1864. The same year, Johnson painted his group portrait The Blodgett Family.
The Evening Post, "Fine Arts: Pictures at the Century Club," December 7, 1863: “The picture which attracted the most attention was a cartoon by Eastman Johnson, illustrative of an incident that occurred in a recent battle, and which, as nearly as we can recall it, was thus narrated by an eye-witness: In a charge made by one of our regiments, a drummer boy of scarcely fifteen years of age, while beating the onset, was struck by a fragment of a shell and fell wounded upon the field. The boy’s father, who was a private in the same regiment, stopped at the side of his son, and ripping up the leg of the little fellow’s pantaloons, bandaged the wounded limb, and then placing the young hero upon his own broad shoulders, bore him, playing vigorously on his drum, which he had not failed to retain, forward into the fight.
“Johnson has told the story, in a simple though forcible manner, and produced a picture vigorous in treatment, happy in composition and full of life and action. The drawing of the principal figures—the son and his father—is critically correct, and executed with much freedom of expression. The boy’s position is natural and unconstrained, and the bearing of the man neither ungraceful nor lacking in soldierly dignity…
“The spirit and energy expressed in the lad’s countenance, and the honest pride and love apparent in the father’s, and unmistakably rendered, and show that the artist possesses a clear knowledge and observance of human nature…”
Eastman Johnson letter dated January 4, 1864, to Erastus Dow Palmer, an Albany, New York sculptor, who had asked Johnson for paintings for an exhibition: "The Drummer Boy I have not yet painted nor begun, but am making the drawing for it, larger, & shall get at it soon."