Harvey Johnson

1921 - 2005

Harvey W. Johnson grew up surrounded by art. His father, Burt Johnson, was a sculptor, his mother a landscape artist, and one of his aunts, also his art teacher, was Annetta St. Gaudens, sister-in-law of the famous sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens. “Despite all the family interest in art, nobody every pushed it on me as a career. However, I was so enveloped in the atmosphere of art that I absorbed it by osmosis. I can’t recall ever wanting to be anything but an artist – except for a little while, when I was about six and wanted to be a fireman,” Johnson laughingly recalled.

Among Johnson’s earliest memories were modeling bits of clay from a sculpture his father was working on and, he says, “… the days I spent pulling Plasticine from the inside of a built-up form of an exceptionally large statue, while my father worked on the details on the outside of the sculpture.”

In eighth grade Harvey entered a drawing of an Indian being shot off his horse in a citywide contest in New York City, which he won. As a freshman in high school, he was made the art editor of the school’s literary magazine, and he took art classes offered by the WPA (Works Progress Administration). However, in spite of the promise he showed as an artist, Harvey decided to drop out of high school to join the U.S. Army.

Following a three-plus year stint in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during WWII, Johnson returned to what was clearly his calling and enrolled at the Art Students League in New York City, where both his mother and father had studied before him. After art school, he worked for several studios and advertising agencies before landing a job as an instructor at the Famous Artists School in Connecticut, where he worked for nearly two decades. In the early years of teaching at The Famous Artists School, Johnson picked up some freelance work illustrating pulp novels. “It was a marvelous training ground. And as time went on, I got more and more work on Western themes,” recalled Johnson.

In 1966 Johnson responded to an ad in Western Horseman magazine regarding a group of Western artists being formed. He became a charter member of the group, which named itself the Cowboy Artists of America and served as its president and vice president during a tenure with the organization that lasted nearly four decades.

By the 1980s Johnson was focused on painting mountain men because, as he said, “… there are hundreds of stories I know about and want to eventually paint.” And, “I want to show episodes never depicted before. The mountain man’s adventures were so varied, and he covered such a large slice of our nation in his effort find furs ….”

Today, Harvey Johnson’s son, Scott Lee Johnson, continues the family’s deep artistic tradition, working as a sculptor.

CLYMAN SAVES SUBLETTE Oil on Canvas Mounted on Board 1987 24 x 36 inches