Catalogue Entry
Johnson’s wife, Elizabeth, no doubt turned his attention to representations of women alone—either in interiors or outside. Such women are often lost in thought and suggest sentient beings with an inner life. In my interviews with descendants of Johnson’s siblings, she is presented as an independent woman. Johnson painted her portrait in which she assumes the posture of a woman who thinks on her own (also see theme 31.3). —PH
MacGibeny, 2021: This subject is entirely unique in Johnson's oeuvre. Although—or perhaps because—two women kissing may have been considered a controversial subject at the time, the painting likely remained in Johnson's studio and is known only from the references by critic Sadakichi Hartmann below, published after Johnson's death.
Sidney Allan (pseudonym of Sadakichi Hartmann), The Photographic Times, 1910: "A different version of the S shape, cut into by a diagonal angular form, we have in Mary Cassatt's 'Mother and Child', Fig. 120. The same in reverse fashion occurs in Eastman Johnson's 'The Kiss,' Fig. 127. Combinations like these will always produce an odd picturesque effect."
Sadakichi Hartmann, "Eastman Johnson: American Genre Painter," The International Studio, 1908: "[The sentimentalism of Schadow, Lessing, Sohn and Bendemann] never appealed to [Johnson] very strongly, and although he tried himself in that direction, as, for instance, in The Kiss and Feeding the Lamb, the pictures painted under that influence do not bear the stamp of individuality of his other work."