Night Watch

Frank Tenney Johnson said of his Western subjects, "seeing these people in the moonlight or even in the magic light of the stars impressed me very deeply." (as quoted in The American West: Legendary Artists of the Frontier, p. 175) Observations like this led him to produce a large number of paintings of subjects under the green-blue shadows of the Western night sky. It is for these accomplished nocturnal scenes which Johnson is best known, and which are recognized as his greatest technical achievements. Richard Saunders tells us "During the 1910s and 1920s such romantic 'nocturnes' won Johnson critical praise. In 1923 a painting of a rugged Mexican traveling with a laden burro by lamplight won a $1000 prize at the Salmagundi Club's annual exhibition in New York." (The C.R. Smith Collection of Western American Art, p. 140)

A composition similar to those that gained him renown, Night Watch depicts a moonlit scene of frontiersmen around a campfire, with a background of covered wagons set against a dark yet luminous night sky. Johnson's ability to so skillfully render night scenes certainly reminds the viewer of Frederic Remington's great nocturnes. Indeed, "in technical terms, he is perhaps closer in spirit to the later Remington style than any other Western painter." (P.H. Hassrick, History of Western American Art, New York, 1987, p. 134)