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
National Academician Database, accessed March 24, 2021: "Gifford was fifty-seven years of age at his death in August 1880. The art historian Ila Weiss has suggested that both the Metropolitan's and the Pennsylvania Academy's portraits were executed after his death, from memory with the assistance of studies made presumably during Gifford's lifetime, surely including this portrait of his friend retained by Johnson."
MacGibeny, 2021: Johnson may have referred to this portrait or a version of it when he wrote to his acquaintance Mr. [likely E. C. (Edmund Clarence)] Stedman from Nantucket in 1880, the year of Gifford's death: "I shall bring a portrait of Gifford, for the memorial accessory, a head."
Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–1880). Well-known American landscape painter and a close friend of Johnson.
White, Terry James. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1967–.
- Portrait pose:
- Posthumous: