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.
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