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. Like those done earlier, Johnson generally used charcoal (named in some records as black chalk) with touches of white and created a strong chiaroscuro for his sitters. Gradually he moved away from the strong chiaroscuro style he had been using, and his later portraits tend to be sketchier (as was the taste in art at the time) but no less professional. He used pastel to bring in color in some of these portraits. —PH
MacGibeny, 2022: Although the date and other details of this portrait are not known, it seems likely that Johnson would have made it during the period 1879–1889. In 1879, Kennedy had donated the Mihály Munkacsy painting Blind Milton dictating "Paradise Lost" to his daughters, 1877, to the Lenox Library; Johnson made copies of this painting, so it is possible the men could have known each other at that time. Further, Johnson began to focus almost exclusively on portraits in the 1880s, and Kennedy died in 1887; the portrait could have been made from life, or posthumously from a photograph.
Robert Lenox Kennedy (1822–1887).
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