Catalogue Entry
By the summer of 1849, Johnson resolved to go to Europe with his friend George Hall. Although he reputedly was earning a good living with his portrait drawings, figure and genre painting attracted him and first-rate instruction in these fields was not available in the United States. Moreover, both artists realized the importance of studying the European masters at first hand. Hall and Johnson were coaxed into choosing Düsseldorf by the American Art-Union, the most important organ of artistic patronage in America in the 1840s. To raise funds for his travel, Johnson sold two drawings to the AAU and was also assured by Andrew Warner of the AAU that the organization would accept future works by him. Johnson and Hall sailed from New York on August 14, 1849, for Europe. He took classes at the Royal Academy in Düsseldorf, but records of his exact attendance are not known. He felt skilled enough by October 1950 to send two oils to the NAD for sale. In a letter accompanying the shipment he admitted he was sending the pictures “rather earlier in my practice of oils than I should otherwise do.” The two pictures, Peasants on the Rhine and The Junior Partner are long since lost. The majority of his genre paintings were done in the Netherlands, after he moved to the Hague in 1851
[Adapted from Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson, pp. 27–32]. —PH
Hills, 2021: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was first published in serial form for The National Era, beginning with its June 5, 1851 issue. Published as a book in 1852, the initial printing was 300,000. The novel became popular throughout Europe as an anti-slavery novel, as did the stage adaptation by George L. Aiken. (See Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Southern Methodist University Press, 1985.)
Exhibition review in Algemeen Handelsblad, 1853: "Now that Father Tom and Mrs. Beecher Stowe are, or were, the subject of all conversations, one can easily categorize a scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the historical genre. Now we find in No. 260 a painting by E. Johnson in The Hague, depicting Father Tom and Evangeline. The youthful Eva, which Mrs. Stowe depicts as the type of the most pure and abstract Christianity, is depicted by the painter as an ugly, flat-nosed little creature sitting grinning over a book (probably the bible), while Father Tom, the inspired and gushing Tom, with his childlike belief, is rendered like a monkey, of the monkiest sort, who awaits the moment his ugly mistress will go play with him. O, Mrs Stowe, if only you would know this! All your dinner parties would have been embittered, and all your parties ruined! Of your protagonist they made an orangutan, of Divine Eva, a little miscreant!"
"De's Gravenhaagsche tentoonstelling van schilderijen in 1853, en de beoordeeling derzelve in het Algemeen Handelsblad," a pamphlet written in response, highlighting the racism in the review: "We do not want to claim that, for example the faces on the painting of J. L. Bruna in Enschede, and those of A. A. van de Kasteele in The Hague, are pretty ‘jodenkopjes’ [diminutive of ‘Jewish heads’, a bigoted depiction of Jews], but we cannot—and perhaps because they are drawn from life—dismiss the whole work because of that reason, as the reviewer has done in his indignation. Everything sublunar has its own demands, its own peculiarity, its own intrinsic character; and also from that point of view, those figures are not represented less than what they are, than the negro head of E. Johnson in The Hague, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who the reviewer himself compares to a monkey of the most monkiest type" [Translations by Erik Schoonhoven].
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