The "American Rembrandt"

T h e " A m e r i c a n - R e m b r a n d t " o n N a n t u c k e t

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by Robert A. diCurcio

NANTUCKET! SAY THE word at a gathering and faces light up, pleasant memories flow, and a mystic aura is evoked. True in the day of whaling as it is now, just as surely did the faraway island cast its spell on one of America's greatest artists: Eastman Johnson, an American "Old Master" if ever there was one. In 1870, as an accomplished and renowned portrait painter and "genre" artist, he brought his new bride, Elizabeth Buckley of Troy, N.Y., to summer on The Island at the suggestion of one Dr. Gaillard Thomas to "...meet his desire for a quiet and incurious locality".

Nantucket became Eastman Johnson's summer studio ever after, for he — like so many others to follow him — succumbed to that happy malady: falling in love with Nantucket Island. His residence and studio perched atop "the Cliff' looking out over cranberry bogs that in those days ringed the broad, watery expanse of Nantucket Sound below. Here he was to immortalize the 19th century Nantucketers who culled those cranberry bogs dressed in stove pipe hats or full skirts with fancy bonnets — a remarkable series of genre pictures of those elegant and distinguished rustics, the Nantucket cranberry pickers.

In 1873, Scribner's Monthly published an article on Johnson, reading in part:". . .the artist Eastman Johnson has shown his usual fine taste in taking up his residence here and has transformed two of the old houses that stood on the site into a home and studio. The location is just out of town on the Cliff which is high ground just above the bathing beach, commanding a magnificent sweep of the ocean, a spot which ought to be occupied by cottages and hotels!"

Eastman Johnson's reputation in the latter half of the 19th century stemmed mainly from his popularly acclaimed genre paintings — pictures of the dignity in the every day life and labors of common people. After 1870, Nantucket became the principal locale for his genre paintings of the American scene. Previously, as a sometime Washington, D.C. resident, he had painted negro slave scenes; his famous Negro Life in the South 1859 (The New York Historical Society) — or My Old Kentucky Home as it later came to be called after Stephen Foster's popular song of the same name — earned him the respect of the public, the prestigious National Academy of Design, and the art critics of the day, one of whom called it "A first class character piece". Although some today would

Eastman Johnson at work in his Nantucket Studio.

THE "AMERICAN REMBRANDT" 9

condemn as hypocritical this painting ot negro slaves singing, playing relaxing, and courting, such moralists would do well to consider more closely the envy that the perspicacious Johnson painted on the faces of the white children on the periphery of the scene; it is genuine.

Elected a full academician of the National Academy in 1860, the most talented young painter of American domestic life of the time, genre artist second to none, Nantucket summer resident Eastman Johnson was no New England provincial. He had spent six marvelous years abroad in the 1850's learning the craft of oil painting - a European tour that was de rigeur for the serious professional of his day. At the "Dusseldorf School" in Germany he studied briefly in 1851 with Emmanuel Leutze, an American who was famous for his huge (12 by 21 feet), patriotic painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware 1851 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC), known to generations of Americans chiefly through an engraving of it that EJ helped to prepare.

On the whole dissatisfied with the rest of the German genre artists in Dusseldorf (recommended to him by the American Art-Union, then the most powerful group of art patrons), he changed his ambience rather quickly to that of The Hague in Holland where he found his life-long inspiration in the paintings of the Dutch old masters. In late 1851, Johnson wrote to the American Art-Union:

"I am at present at The Hague where I am deriving much advantage from studying the splendid works of Rembrandt and a few other of the old Dutch masters (probably Vermeer, van de Cappele, van Mieris, ter Borch, et al)...l must say I regret having spent so long a time in Dusseldorf (not quite a year). . .where the present artists are deficient in some of the chief requisites, as in color, in which they are scarcely tolerable. . .Leutze was the only colorist amongst them. . (as quoted by Patricia Hills in her excellent monograph Eastman Johnson, op. cit)

EJ's ability to handle color was one of his great assets; he made enough of an impression on the sophisticated Dutch with it, that he became known to them as "the American Rembrandt". The Dutch genre tradition became second nature to him. What is more, he was offered the position of court painter to His Majesty William II. But this young man, born but a few years earlier in 1824 in the hinterlands of Lowell, Maine, refused royal patronage in the land of Rembrandt and Vermeer, and after a four year apprenticeship made his way in 1855 to Paris in search of even more instruction.

10 HISTORIC NANTUCKET

There he studied in the atelier of Thomas Couture, a teacher who was partial to young Americans. Couture, recognized for his sumptuous colorism, is now remembered as the teacher of the great French iconolast painter Manet. (The celebrated Impressionist painters of the day were once known as Manet's "gang.) It was Couture who impressed even more strongly on EJ the importance of method in art. It was, in the final analysis, this early grounding in European coloristic method that elevated EJ's art to greatness. He carried European method back to an American art scene, employed but re-interpreted it in the extolling of honest toil in the fields, barns, and Maple groves — the admirable dignity of rural America. When, in the 1880's and 90's, his career emphasis changed to depicting fashionable and affluent individuals in elegant interiors, and to portraits of the "upper classes", the resulting so-called "conversation pieces" trace their pedigree, as Patricia Hills puts it (op. cit.), to the seventeenth century Dutch and Couture's atelier. If Manet was a bete noire of French academic painting and the precursor of French Impressionism, then Johnson is the fair haired boy of American genre painting and precursor to the likes of Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer, titans of 19th century realism.

Upon his return to the U.S. in late 1855 and thereafter until the early 1870's, Johnson applied his European lessons mainly to subjects of the American Indian, the negro slave, Civil War combatants, maple sugaring and barn scenes in Maine. Since it was a time when daguerreotype photography was coming into its own, painters, collectors, and the art public turned their attentions to pictures of anecdotal scenes from American life, such as EJ's much admired The Boyhood of Lincoln 1868 (The University of Michigan Museum of Art), showing an adolescent Abe by the fireside intently studying the borrowed book of song and story. Portraiture was left for a while to the mechanized novelty of the photographer's craft.

The Nantucket Scene

A recognized genre artist and portraitist before setting foot on Nantucket, EJ fulfilled the Dutch prophecy as the American Rembrandt during those halcyon summers on The Island. He took to Nantucket in much the same way as Herman Melville (a contemporary genius whom he probably never met) explains his own affinity in Moby Dick : ". . .because there was a fine boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island which amazingly pleased me."

One of the first things Johnson did as an artist on Nantucket was to

construct a staging for a painting of boisterous children frolicking on and around an abandoned Stage Coach. Johnson used Nantucket children as models, and the result was the large (3 ft. x 5 ft.) oil The Old Stage Coach 1871 (Milwaukee Art Center) — as idealized and sentimentalized a scene of childhood as one was likely to see. But this was what the spirit of the times (Zeitgeist, to recall the philosophical term) demanded: Americans were wont to portray themselves as youthful, brash, in the driver's seat, and way out front in those days; this to blot out, perhaps if nothing more, the trauma of their Civil war.

The 1907 catalog of the American Art Association (of a posthumous retrospective show after Johnson's death in 1906) describes The Old Stage Coach: "The body of an old stage coach which, in its time, judging from its form and color, must have been a famous vehicle (Johnson had the vehicle transported from the Catskills where he first conceived of the picture) has been cast aside on an open field near a farmyard, and a large group of merry children are playing with it. Two girls and two boys, prancing and kicking, represent the four horses. Others occupy the box seat and interior, and a more enterprising lad stands on top waving his hat, while a companion endeavors to climb up to him." Of Johnson's Civil War paintings, The Wounded Drummer Boy 1871 (The Union League Club of N.Y.) is probably the most famous. When Civil War memories were finally far behind, Johnson on Nantucket began to lighten his palette, and women appear more frequently in his paintings, especially after his marriage and after his only daughter, Ethel, was born in 1870. Much reminiscent of Vermeer are his studies of women posed indoors near a window.

Although he made occasional trips to Maine in the late 1870's, and though he kept a winter studio at West 55th St. in New York, the majority of Johnson's post 1870 genre scenes were set in Nantucket, and salient among them are the series on cranberry picking and corn husking bees, activities as peculiarly American as his beloved maple sugaring. The quintessential "Americanness" of his Nantucket scenes explains much of the appeal in his nostalgic renderings of agricultural labor.

Another aspect of his critical acclaim at the time was that he exalted the labor of common folk as a joyous contribution to the growing nation with which they appear to be in complete harmony. This we may contrast with the scenes of his European contemporary counterparts such as the Barbizon School in general and Jean-Francois Millet in particular, whose famous painting The Gleaners 1857 (Louvre, Paris) of stoop-backed, babushka'd peasant women in a stubble field shows none of the optimism

THE "AMERICAN REMBRANDT"

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and esprit de corps in Johnson's farm scenes; although Millet sought to dignify the workers in the fields, he conveys a hopelessness that never for a moment entered Johnson's oeuvre, not even in the late character studies of old Nantucket sea captains.

Thus the contemporary critic William Walton could state with ample justification in Scribner's Magazine XL (1906) . .his (Johnson's) conception of the rendering of 'the life of the poor', of 'the tillers of the soil', and 'the ex-toilers of the sea' preaches no ugly gospel of discontent as does so much of the contemporary French and Flemish art of this genre; his Nantucket neighbors know nothing of the protestation douloureuse de la race asservie a la glebe; there is no crie de la terre arising from his cranberry marshes or his hay-stuffed barns".

He continued: "The happy combination of right feeling and sound technique is manifest in all the details; the respectable old silk hat which constitutes so important an incident in several of the best of his Nantucket scenes would have been fatal to the ordinary genre painter — it is dignifiedly hospitable in the Glass With the Squire 1880 (Annmary Brown Memorial, Prov., R.I.), gravely stern in The Reprimand 1880 (location and owner unknown), genuinely pathetic in Contemplation (probably Captain Charles Myrick 1879, Nantucket Historical Association, Peter Foulger Museum) and Embers 1880 (Mrs. Herbert S. Darlington, Lajolla, Calif.) But seldom has so unimportant a baggage played such an important role in art."

In another commentary on the comparison of E.J.'s genre with one of his European counterparts, Patricia Hills [op. cit.] states, ". . the content of the Breton is the awesome and solemn but necessary labor of the French peasant; the content of the Johnson is the democratic and even hedonistic gaiety of a Nantucket cranberry harvest."

Of equal interest, as far as his contributions to Nantucket's art scene, are Johnson's depictions of Nantucket personages within Nantucket interiors. He did many renditions of old whaling masters (sea captains) such as Captain Myrick, a favorite and splendid type. An American Art Association catalogue in 1907 stated:

"Charles Myrick, a Nantucket man, appears in several of Johnson's pictures. This [Captain Myrick, ca. 1879, F. N. Bard, Chicago, 111.) is a study of an old New England type which is now fast disappearing. An old man with a fringe of whiskers around his face, wearing an old-fashioned beaver hat, black coat and waist coat, with a loose white tie, leans for-

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ward, resting his right hand upon an ivory-handled malacca stick. His head is lowered, his eyes raised, and his pathetic, wrinkled face suggests a life with more than the ordinary share of hardships."

Captain Myrick was the subject of the last genre painting exhibited by Johnson (Embers shown in 1899 at The National Academy of Design), showing the old Captain, an ember himself, staring in contemplation at the dying embers in his fireplace. This is a most appropriate exhibit in a career nearing its close.

After 1880, Johnson resumed his early interest in portraiture, possibly because of the lucrative commissions he was capable of attracting a t t h a t p o i nt. H i s l a s t d a t ed g e n re p a i n tin g i s T h e N a n t u c k e t S c h o o l o f Philosophy 1887 (The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore). E. U. Crosby (op. cit.) quotes 'A memo on file at the Walters Art Gallery' as follows:

"Eastman Johnson called at 455 Madison Ave., New York City, on Edward D. Adams, on Sunday, April 21, 1889, and gave the names of the character studies he had as models in the execution of his painting entitled "The Nantucket School of Philosophers", belonging to Mr. Adams. (The painting shows a group of old men seated in a ring around an old wood stove in a Nantucket cobbler's shop, conversing and possibly reminiscing about days gone by.) Mr. Johnson explained that the following 'philosophers' were alive at that date: the shoemaker, Captain Haggerty; the talker, Captain Moore; on the left-hand side, leaning on his hand, Captain Ray, and that the other 'captains' were all dead." Crosby further states that Captain Haggerty's shop was located in a small wooden building on Liberty Street, at the rear of the Henry Coffin property.

Writing in the Oct. 1958 issue of H i s t o r i c N a n t u c k e t , the quarterly publication of the Nantucket Historical Association (pp. 35-38), Louise Stark sums up the warm feeling that Nantucketers can harbor for this artist who more than anyone else set the tone and the stage for the phenomenal flourishing of the arts on Nantucket:

"Eastman Johnson was a great portrait painter as well as a painter of daily scenes. Some of his portraits of Nantucket people give me the feeling he painted them because they fascinated him and he loved them.

"No artist I've found of Nantucket subjects has given me as much a feeling of the island and its people in the time he painted as Eastman Johnson. Nantucket is fortunate to have had such a devoted and skillfully trained artist so engrossed in the island."