1824 -1906 · American realism and genre painting

Rural work, familiar interiors, direct portraits and light inherited from Dutch masters make Eastman Johnson a major chronicler of 19th-century America.

Jonathan Eastman Johnson was born in 1824 in Lovell, Maine. After an apprenticeship with a lithographer in Boston, he settled in Washington and quickly gained a reputation for his drawn portraits of political leaders and personalities. In 1849, he left for Europe. In Düsseldorf, he studied with Emanuel Leutze, then stayed for several years in The Hague, where the observation of Rembrandt and Dutch masters deepened his use of light and domestic intimacy. Returning to the United States in 1855, Johnson became one of the country's leading genre painters. He represented families, workers, African-American communities, Civil War scenes and rural activities, sometimes with a social complexity that goes beyond the anecdote. Co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870, he also set up a summer workshop in Nantucket. His cranberry harvests gave a national dimension to the collective work of the island. From the 1880s, he returned more to portraiture. He died in New York in 1906. The "Eastman Johnson" selection notably compared The Cranberry Harvest, island of Nantucket. His reading favors figures.

Eastman Johnson gives everyday life a dignity of history: work, light and community become visible signs of an America in transformation.