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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

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