Catalogue Entry
Works in the Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné are organized into themes based on medium, locale (United States or Europe), and subject matter. Portraits made in the United States are further categorized by when Johnson made them: early (before he went to Europe in 1849) and late (after he returned to the United States in 1855). Uncategorized paintings are paintings for which all of these details are unknown. Either the subject matter indicated by the title is ambiguous (for example, “An Arrangement in Black and White”) or the subject matter is clear (for example, A Boy in a Torn Straw Hat), but it is unknown when and/or where Johnson made the work. In some cases it is not even certain but deduced from the available information that the works are paintings rather than drawings. Future research may enable the works in this theme to be identified more specifically.
There are also paintings in our research records that are not categorized and included in the catalogue raisonné, because they have not been proven to be unique works. They may be the same as paintings already included in the EJCR with different titles. In those cases, we add information from the not-included work (title, provenance, etc.) to the entry for the included work as “possibly.” We will add catalogue entries for those works in the future if research proves them to be unique. —AM
MacGibeny, 2021: "An Arrangement in Black and White" is an uncharacteristically modern title for a painting by Johnson, and suggests an unusually monochromatic palette; however, he likely either provided the title or approved it, since he contributed the painting directly to the Kurtz Gallery sale in 1879. The title is a frank reference to the abstractly musical titles given by the American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) to his own works, including Arrangement in Black and White, c. 1876–79, a portrait of a standing woman in a white dress (now called Arrangement in White and Black, at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington). The idiosyncratic phrase had begun to be used in several popular publications of the mid- to late 1870s, usually in a witty manner. Six months prior to the Kurtz Gallery exhibition, Whistler had argued his case in a London court against critic John Ruskin, whom he had sued for libel for publishing a scathing review of Whistler’s experimental paintings, equating one of them to “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Whistler won, but was awarded only one farthing. Johnson’s subject matter and its relation to the title are not yet known, but it may be a portrait, and it seems likely that An Arrangement in Black and White was used to invoke a figure and phrase that were in the news to attract the attention of prospective buyers.