Born on 29 July 1824: Jonathan Eastman Johnson, US painter and printmaker who died on 05 April 1906.
Between 1840 and 1842 he was apprenticed to the Boston lithographer John H. Bufford [1810–1870]. Johnson's mastery of this medium is apparent in his few lithographs, of which the best known is Marguerite (1870). In 1845 he moved to Washington DC, where he drew portraits in chalk, crayon and charcoal of prominent US personalities, including Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams and Dolly Madison (all 1846). In 1846 he settled in Boston and brought his early portrait style to its fullest development.
His charcoal drawings, of exceptional sensitivity, were remarkably sophisticated for an essentially self-trained artist. In 1848 he went to Europe to study painting at the Düsseldorf Akademie. During his two-year stay he was closely associated with Emanuel Leutze, and painted his first genre subjects, for example The Counterfeiters (1855). He then spent three years in The Hague, studying color, composition and naturalism in 17th-century Dutch painting. The influence of the Dutch masters on his portrait style was so great that he was called ‘the American Rembrandt’.
The New Bonnet, Metropolitan Museum of Art (USA)
In 1855, after two months in Thomas Couture’s Paris studio, he returned to the US. He then turned his attention to US subject-matter. He made studies of Indians in Wisconsin and painted portraits while in Washington (e.g. George Shedden Riggs, 1855) and Cincinnati. He finally settled in New York.