Catalogue Entry
Johnson went to Europe in 1849 to learn techniques for creating figure paintings in oil. However, he had been a professional portrait draughtsman in Boston and Washington, D.C. for at least five years before that. In those early drawings he had a keen sense of creating heads using light tones and shadowed areas to create three-dimensionality. Studying the works of Rembrandt at the Hague inspired him to use the same techniques for his oil portraits. Whereas some of his portraits of men were commissions and others were of his close friends, such as Worthington Whittredge, his oil portraits of European women were almost exclusively commissions—often the spouses of the men who had commissioned pairs of portraits. —PH
MacGibeny, 2021: Photographs of this portrait and two others were donated to the Archives of American Art by C. J. F. Thieme, great-grandson of the subjects of the portraits, and A. C. Thieme, granddaughter of the subjects. The original letter from the latter in the Archives of American Art specifies that the sitters are her grandparents. Her grandfather, Johann Adrian Friederich Thieme, found a drawing of himself in Johnson's sketchbook, which was sitting on the mantle of a hotel in The Hague where both were staying in 1852. Johnson told Thieme that the sketches in the sketchbook were heads intended for a monumental painting of the crossing of the Delaware. Thieme purchased the drawing of himself and commissioned portraits of both himself and his wife.
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