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
American Art Association sale catalogue, 1916: "A full-length figure of a young girl in costume of the early part of the nineteenth century, with pannier skirt and bodice of lilac, underskirt of figured stuff, and white apron, holding a billet doux in her right hand and looking out towards the spectator from under a fan held up in her left hand. The setting for the figure consists of summer verdure and a lake in the middle distance."
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