Catalogue Entry
When Johnson returned from Europe late in 1855 and moved in with his family in Washington, D.C., he began receiving portrait commissions. On his trip to Superior, Michigan, in 1856 and 1857, he did charcoal portrait drawings of family and friends. Like the commissioned drawings done earlier, Johnson generally used charcoal (named in some records as black chalk) with touches of white, but the strong chiaroscuro is less evident for his women sitters. Many of these portraits are in pastel, which creates a softer visage. In his later professional years as a painter of oil portraits there are few portraits of women. His art commanded high prices; perhaps families were then reluctant to include their women members as portrait sitters. —PH
Hills, 2022: The sitter was the daughter of Parke Godwin, the abolitionist editor of The New York Evening Post, and granddaughter of the poet William Cullen Bryant.
Minna Godwin Goddard (1846–1927). Daughter of Parke Godwin; granddaughter of William Cullen Bryant; wife of Frederic Norton Goddard. Bequeathed the William Cullen Bryant Homestead to the Trustees of Reservations, Massachusetts.
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