Catalogue Entry
When Johnson returned to the United States, he not only painted genre paintings but he also continued to paint portraits, which gave him a steady income. After 1880 Johnson turned to portraiture almost exclusively. During the 1880s and 1890s he painted businessmen, lawyers, university presidents, and three U.S. presidents from life. At times he also painted their wives and children.
He was also commissioned to paint posthumous portraits, often from photographs. These portraits by and large do not have the sparkle and active brushwork of those done from life. It seems that the demand for portraits of business and civic leaders (and members of exclusive men’s clubs) was so high that portrait painters would often make copies of each other’s paintings to satisfy the market for such images. In many instances, it has been difficult to render opinions for such paintings. —PH
MacGibeny, 2021: Evidence suggests that Johnson painted this portrait in 1877. Although Baur reported no inscription, his note for Johnson's portrait of the sitter's father, Alfred Wilkinson, states that "The present owners [who were daughters of the sitter] state that the date on the picture [1857] is erroneous and that it was executed in 1877." According to a 1976 letter in the archives of the Everson Museum of Art from Wilkinson family descendant Charlotte Wilson to her cousin Henry Bragdon, Johnson painted the portrait of Alfred Wilkinson, two portraits of Charlotte May Wilkinson, and this portrait of their son Alfred Wilkinson, Jr. at the same time.
Alfred Wilkinson, Jr. was speculated to be the subject of Portrait of a Man, owned by the Everson Museum of Art, when the identity of that portrait's sitter was being investigated in 1976. However, in a letter that year to Robert Earle Graham, who was researching these paintings, Charlotte Wilkinson Wilson, niece of Alfred Wilkinson, Jr., stated that that portrait was of "some New York man—name unknown and in no way related to Johnsons nor Wilkinsons."
Alfred Wilkinson, Jr. (1858–1918).
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