Catalogue Entry
The identities of the men in these portraits have not yet been confirmed. However, the paintings are known or believed to have been done in the United States based on factors including their style, inscribed dates, and the appearance of the sitters when images are available. Johnson painted the vast majority of his oil portraits after he returned to the United States from Europe in 1855. —AM
MacGibeny, 2021: "The late Edward Lyman of Brooklyn" is inscribed on one of the stretchers; however, that identification is not certain. The sitter does not resemble Edward Hutchinson Hutchinson Lyman, who was portrayed by Johnson; further, Johnson's sitter was a businessman, and the subject of this unidentified portrait is wearing a clerical garment. When queried by the painting's owner in October 1959, the Frick Art Reference Library, an authoritative archive of materials related to Western art that maintains records of many of Johnson's portraits, replied that they had no record of this portrait and could not find Lyman's name in any of their biographical dictionaries. Current research has not been more revealing.
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