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
Bayard Taylor, “The Picture of St. John,” 1866 (in praise of Johnson’s painting Negro Life at the South, according to Edgar French, "An American Portrait Painter of Three Historical Epochs," World's Work, 1906):
"You, too, whom how to name I may not guess,
Except the jacinth and the ruby, blent,
The native warmth of life might represent,
Which, drawn from barns and homesteads, you express,
Or vintage revels, round the maple-tree;
Or when the dusky race you quaintly dress,
In art that gives them finer liberty,—
Made by your pencil, ere by battle, free!"
Bayard Taylor (1825–1878). Poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat. Wrote poem an “Ode to Eastman Johnson” [Johnson file in Berea College Archives, RG 13.14].
White, Terry James. The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1967–.
- Portrait pose:
- Posthumous: