Johnson’s wife, Elizabeth, no doubt turned his attention to representations of women alone—either in interiors or outside. Such women are often lost in thought and suggest sentient beings with an inner life. In my interviews with descendants of Johnson’s siblings, she is presented as an independent woman. Johnson painted her portrait in which she assumes the posture of a woman who thinks on her own (also see theme 31.3). —PH
Hills, 2021: John I. H. Baur noted in his Notebook Y at the Archives of American Art, p. 33, that Johnson made three pictures called Devotion.
Charles Childs, quoted in Baur AAA Notebook Y, c. 1938–1941, p. 33: "A nun in a bedroom kneeling before a high, heavily carved desk with an ornate high back. Her head is in profile seen from the right, her arms and clasped hands rest on the slanting face of the desk. She is clothed in a black gown and mantle which covers half her head and falls over her back to the floor. She kneels on a green rug which is placed over a richer, more colorful rug covering the entire floor. In the background to her left is shown part of a high dark four poster bed with carved wooden canopy. The bed clothing is a warm rust red. Beside the bed between it and the nun is a delicately made three legged, round topped wash stand upon which is a green pitcher and a candlestick. Most of the woodwork is an amber brown with touches of sienna and some red notes. The wall background is a flecked gray-yellow deepening to brown with olive in it at the outer edges of the canvas."
- Subject matter: