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
MacGibeny, 2021: In a letter to his friend and fellow artist Jervis McEntee dated December 2, 1880, from Nantucket, Johnson wrote: "I painted Mr. O'Conner's [sic] portrait today—He has come back and taken a house to pass the winter here—We spent a good part of the day in the studio—…" The painting is shown hanging on the wall in the upper left corner of a photograph of Johnson's studio reproduced in William Walton, "Eastman Johnson, Painter," Scribner's Magazine, September 1906.
Henry Holt, "Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor." The Weekly Review, 1921, p. 149: “I once spent some happy days with Eastman at his summer home in Nantucket. A near neighbor was Charles O’Conor, who had been the leader of the New York bar, and its terror. His learning and logic were famous, but his sarcasm and invective were dreaded more. And there, in his old age, after his merciless triumphs, he was, I speak deliberately, the very gentlest man, and the most deferential to every human being, man, woman, and child, that I ever knew.”
Charles O'Conor (1804–1884). Jurist who prosecuted “Boss” Tweed and was a presidential candidate in 1872. “Made his permanent home in Nantucket in 1880,” where he later died, and was Johnson’s neighbor on Nantucket and became interested “in the place and people, and considered the few years that he lived here the happiest of his long life” [Centennial Catalogue of the Nantucket Historical Association].
White, Terry James. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1967–.
- Portrait pose
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