Catalogue Entry
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
Hills, 2022: 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.
MacGibeny, 2022: Inspired by an event from the Battle of Antietam, which was fought on September 17, 1862, Johnson made six paintings and a drawing on the theme of the wounded drummer boy between 1863 and 1871.
Appletons' Journal, March 14, 1874, p. 347: "Everybody familiar with his painting of the 'Wounded Drummer-Boy,' will remember the spirit and grace of the picture. Unlike Mr. Johnson’s quiet genre pictures, this was one of the most animated war-scenes that any of our artists had delineated, and the early impression made by the painting itself was not weakened when we saw a crayon-study for the picture, which is now on exhibition at Schaus’s."
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."
"Height, 28 inches; width, 22 inches"
[Annotation: “out”]
