Eastman Johnson, Ojibwe Artwork

"Hiawatha," a pastel by Eastman Johnson

"Despite Eastman Johnson's successful Washington season and the promise of new work, he decided to leave the city once again in midsummer 1857 to return to Superior. He explained to his former patron Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

' One might reasonably wonder what attraction that wild region can have for an artist, in comparison with such advantages as would result to me from your kind & flattering offer, the patronage of the most celebrated in the most refined of places. Perhaps I cannot entirely justify it, but in a visit to that country last season I found so much of the picturesque, an of a character so much to my taste and in my line, that I then determined to employ this summer or a portion of it in making sketches of frontier life, a national feature of our present condition and a field for art that is full of interest and freshness and pleasing nature, and yet that has been but little treated. My chief desire is to paint pictures. In Europe I worked six or seven years with diligence and zeal to this end, sacrificing much, and my wish is that it may come to something.'

 

In Wisconsin from August 24 to October 22, Johnson executed a series of portrait heads that have come to be regarded as perhaps the most sensitive midcentury likenesses of Native Americans. His wife recalled, 'Mr. Johnson said the ancient Romans had no more patrician features nor more noble bearing than they.' 

 

The most finished composition of his sojourn is a pastel that represented a bereaved Ojibwe woman.

His stay was cut short at the end of the year when the financial panic of 1857 rendered his real estate investments worthless. His artistic plans were abruptly halted, and he left the frontier for Cincinnati to raise cash with some quick portrait commissions."

 

To be continued

 

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