Eastman Johnson, Dutch Influences

"Christmas-Time, the Blodgett Family" by Eastman Johnson

"After a brief visit in England, Eastman John went on to the Netherlands, and by November had decided to stay on through the winter at The Hague, where he wrote: 'I find I am deriving much advantage from studying the splendid works of Rembrandt and a few other of the old Dutch masters, who I find are only to be seen in Holland.'

Having come to Holland for the find pictures, Johnson would have lost little time in making his way to the Mauritshuis, the grand mansion purchased by the state in 1820 to house the Royal Cabinet of Paintings, established by the newly installed King Willem I eight years earlier. The opening of the museum in 1822 was a source of great national pride, given that much of the collection had been looted at the time of the French occupation of Holland in 1794 and were returned only in 1815.

Johnson was amazed and deeply inspired by Rembrandt, and equally moved by the great seventeenth-century genre painters: Gerrit Dou, Gabriel Metsu, Frans van Mieris, Gerard Ter Borch, and Jan Steen. These may have conveyed to Johnson the evocative power of understated narrative and the expressive potential of well-worn utilitarian objects.

Brooms, baskets, pots and bowls, and vegetables would make frequent appearances in his later narrative subjects, always in the context of the humble, half-lit interiors in which essential family life was enacted. It is hardly surprising that a mid-nineteenth-century American would gravitate to such seemingly 'realistic' subjects rather than religious or historical themes remote from his previous cultural experience."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Eastman Johnson: Painting America" by Teresa Carbone and Patricia Hills.)