Eastman Johnson: Marriage

"The Toilet" by Eastman Johnson
featuring his wife Elizabeth

"Although thriving professionally, Eastman Johnson had yearned for the physical comforts and companionship of married domestic life. He finally found the partner for whom he had longed in the attractive and intelligent Elizabeth Williams Buckley whom he married in June 1859.

The daughter of a New York flour and iron merchant, Elizabeth Buckley spent her early childhood in Troy, New York. She attended the highly progressive Troy Female Seminary. In keeping with the philosophy of its founder, the academy's mission was to instill in young women a love of diverse intellectual pursuits in order to prepare them for responsible motherhood or teaching careers.

A year after their marriage, in May 1870, the Johnsons delighted in the birth of their only child, a daughter named Ethel. In 21872 they purchased a stone town house in which they would pass the length of their married life. In the relocation of his workspace to a domestic setting - a highly unusual move for an artist of Johnson's stature in New York - he approximated the Dutch tradition wherein studios were contiguous with home.

Among the most beautiful works produced by Johnson is a painting eventually titled 'Not at Home,' circa 1873, a domestic 'portrait' of his wife ascending the stairs to the second floor, leaving behind the sunlit parlor visible through an arched doorway. The fact that Elizabeth is depicted wearing a 'day dress,' appropriate for receiving visitors or making calls, indeed suggests that her 'at home' has just ended, and the presence of the little stroller next to the tall-case clock in the hallway implies her return to her child's side in the upper story of the house. Her maternal role is reiterated by the large painting, hanging in the parlor at the right, representing Johnson's own copy of a painting by Jules Breton in which a child is pulled in a rustic perambulator along the edge of a sunny field."

"Not at Home" by Eastman Johnson

To be continued

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