Catalogue Entry
When Johnson returned to the United States, he not only painted genre paintings but he also continued to paint portraits, which gave him a steady income. After 1880 Johnson turned to portraiture almost exclusively. During the 1880s and 1890s he painted businessmen, lawyers, university presidents, and three U.S. presidents from life. At times he also painted their wives and children.
He was also commissioned to paint posthumous portraits, often from photographs. These portraits by and large do not have the sparkle and active brushwork of those done from life. It seems that the demand for portraits of business and civic leaders (and members of exclusive men’s clubs) was so high that portrait painters would often make copies of each other’s paintings to satisfy the market for such images. In many instances, it has been difficult to render opinions for such paintings. —PH
MacGibeny, 2021: In his 1906 article published in the Superior [Wisconsin] Telegram, Hiram Hayes, husband of Johnson's niece Mary Elizabeth Newton Hayes, recalled that Johnson had painted portraits of the parents of Sam McQuade. It seems likely that the story told earlier by Mrs. Hayes in a 1901 article in The Evening Telegram, about a man in Superior offering Johnson gold to paint portraits of his parents, refers to the McQuades. Descendants of the sitters report that the portraits were painted from daguerreotypes.
James McQuade (1801–1859). Husband of Elizabeth Caldwell McQuade; great-grandfather of Mrs. Mary Benson-Berry.
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