Catalogue Entry
In addition to his scenes of everyday life and portraits of people, Johnson created images of historical events and figures from works of literature, drama, and music. For example, “Carry Me, and I’ll Drum You Through” was inspired by an incident from the Battle of Antietam, 1862, and Membership Vote at the Union League Club, May 11, 1876, recorded a contentious meeting in which he participated much later. His Marguerite, Cosette, and Minnehaha are personifications of fictional heroines from novels and poetry. His Boy Lincoln represents both the future United States president and the archetypical American youth who, with determination and hard work, could succeed. Johnson rendered several of these imaginative images as both paintings and drawings. These literary and historical works evince both his personal interest in those subjects and his awareness of their popularity with the broad public. —AM
MacGibeny, 2022: This original drawing by Johnson was engraved by J. P. Davis for reproduction as an illustration for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Seaside and the Fireside" in Houghton Mifflin's editions of The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In the first edition, 1879, in the section of the poem titled "By the Seaside: The Building of the Ship," it was captioned "Standing before/Her father's door,/He saw the form of his promised bride." Throughout the poem, in which an old man designs a ship and promises his daughter's hand to a young man to build it, the old man is referred to as "the Master."
Baur 1940 lists the medium of the drawing as "charcoal heightened with white chalk on canvas." It seems possible that instead it was drawn on paper laid down on canvas, which would result in the smoother finish shown in the photograph.
Johnson made many works related to poems, and drew portraits of Longfellow, his family, and his circle of intellectual friends as important commissions in the late 1840s before going to Europe in 1849 to learn to paint.
- Subject matter:
See all Prints after Works by Johnson.