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: Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, widow of firearms manufacturer Samuel Colt, commissioned Johnson to paint this portrait of her son, Caldwell Hart Colt, who had drowned in 1894 at the age of 35. Johnson painted Colt, an inventor and yachtsman, from a photograph taken on the deck of his ship, The Dauntless. The painting hung in the Caldwell Hart Colt Memorial Parish House, which Mrs. Colt had erected across from the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford, Connecticut, before it was moved to Armsmear, the former Colt Mansion, also in Hartford.
There may be a genealogical connection between this sitter and the sitter in Johnson's 1855 drawing Miss Brinkley, referred to in an alternate title as "later Mrs. Colt."
Caldwell Hart Colt (1858–1894). Yachtsman. Son of Colonel Samuel Colt and Elizabeth H. Jarvis Colt. Vice-commodore of the New York Yacht Club (1888) and commodore of the Larchmont Yacht Club, 1892–1893.
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