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
William Seale, The President's House: A History, 1986 (citing Robert McElroy, Grover Cleveland: The Man and the Statesman, Vol. 2, 1923): [When leaving the White House in 1897, after his second term as President of the United States] “For Cleveland there were no tears, nor did the least expression of sadness seem to lie behind his smiling countenance. As practically all presidents do, he took a final walk through the state rooms, letting his thoughts return to great scenes in his life. In the Red Room he stopped before the big portrait of himself, painted by Eastman Johnson. Quietly he paused; gazing, doubtless wondering at the contrast of his unpopularity that day to the bright prospects of four years before. When he turned to leave, he asked [steward] William Sinclair to take the picture down and store it in the attic, for he saw no reason to impose the Cleveland image on the new President.”
Stephen Grover Cleveland (1837–1908). Twenty-second president of the United States, 1885–1889, and twenty-fourth president of the United States, 1893–1897.
White, Terry James. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1967–.
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