Catalogue Entry
Johnson’s early art training included working in a Boston lithography shop, and hence he knew how to draw on the stone before paper was laid over it and printed. In The Hague, where numerous lithography shops were at his disposal, several of his portraits were executed as lithographs. —PH
Hills, 2022: Johnson had learned lithography in the mid-1840s when he studied at Bufford’s print shop in Boston. Since there were lithography establishments in the Netherlands, he continued this craft for some of his portraits.
Joan Macy Kaskell, "Eastman Johnson, Lithographer," Imprint, 1997:
"When George W. Haight offered this portrait, which is of his grandfather George Winthrop Folsom, to the Metropolitan Museum in 1980, both he and specialists in the field thought it was a drawing. The curator of American paintings, John K. Howat, now Lawrence A. Fleischman Chairman of the Departments of American Art, subsequently wrote Mr Haight,
"'Our paper conservation laboratory has surprised us with a curious probability—that what we thought was a drawing is most likely a lithograph. We are still studying the matter (under microscopes and the like)…I am assured by the Print Department, however, that lithographs by Eastman Johnson are akin to hen's teeth in rarity.'
"The outside appraisers held to their previous opinions, but were conclusively proved wrong when a second impression of the work, owned by the subject's great-granddaughter, Frances Macy Thayer, was laid next to the first and matched in every relevant detail."
George Winthrop Folsom (1846–1915). Son of George Folsom (Chargé d’affaires to the Netherlands, 1850–1853, when Johnson lived in The Hague, the Netherlands) and Margaret Cornelia Winthrop Folsom; brother of Margaret Winthrop and Helen Stuyvesant.
- Portrait pose:
- Portrait sitter families: