Self-Portrait

Eastman Johnson is best known and most admired today as a genre painter, but he began his career as a portraitist and never abandoned that line of art. Having launched his career in the 1840s with charcoal portraits, Johnson welcomed portrait commissions while studying in Europe from 1849 to 1855 and continued to accept them after establishing himself in New York. Johnson hardly compromised his standing as a genre painter by doing so: in the 1860s and 70s he depicted sitters engaged with family members in well appointed domestic interiors. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Johnson turned to portraiture more or less full-time, painting scions of industry, law, politics, and society. Because of the circles in which the artist moved, and the stature of the individuals he painted, "the list of portraits [by] Eastman Johnson reads like the roll-call of American history, from Dolly Madison and Ralph Waldo Emerson to John D. Rockefeller and President Grover Cleveland." (E. French, "An American Portrait Painter of Three Historical Epochs," World's Work,vol. 13, no. 2, December 1906, p. 8307)

During the last stage of his enormously productive career, Johnson painted several self-portraits in addition to those he made of others. These late portraits in general have not received much attention from scholars, since Johnson did not probe beneath his sitters' surface appearance in the manner of his contemporary Thomas Eakins, nor did he flatter his sitters' aesthetic sensibilities with a cosmopolitan style like that of John Singer Sargent or James McNeill Whistler. His late portraits have generally remained in clubs and boardrooms rather than moving to museum walls and they continue to be overlooked, with the result that Johnson's career after 1880 remains relatively unexamined.
John I.H. Baur, who undertook the first comprehensive study of Johnson's work in 1940, condemned Johnson's late portraits for their "almost uniform dullness," and assumed that the artist resumed portrait work because he preferred its higher and more stable renumeration. Like many others since, Baur echoed Johnson's friend Worthington Whittredge, who wrote that "the country has reason to regret that [Johnson] ever stopped painting [genre subjects] and went back to portraits." (Eastman Johnson, 1824-1906: An American Genre Painter, Brooklyn, 1940, p. 24) But as Patricia Hills has argued, Johnson's decision to abandon genre painting for portraiture can be interpreted as a desire to treat more timely and less nostalgic subjects. Challenged by a new generation of artists who were cosmopolitan in outlook and who privileged virtuoso style over national subject matter, Johnson gradually dispensed with paintings of typified American characters situated in rural, communal settings:

At this juncture [around 1880] portraiture--at which Johnson
always excelled--offered a viable alternative that would keep
him independent of the old, idealistic (national virtue,
equality, etc.) way of thinking and in line with the
new individualism. He, too, could be "of his times" through
the delineation of the intellectual, business, and political
leaders of the country (in M. Simpson, S. Mills, and P. Hills,
Eastman Johnson: The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket, San Diego, California, 1990, p. 77)

Not surprisingly, Johnson also displayed a new interest in self-portraiture after 1880. The artist painted virtually no self-portraits in the 1870s, and only a few before 1865--notably the presentation portrait submitted to the National Academy of Design in New York upon his election as an Associate in 1859 and a small canvas depicting the artist seated at a desk, writing a letter. The largest group of known self-portraits depicts Johnson as an older man ranging in age from the late 50s to mid 60s and thus coincides with his increased activity as a portraitist of others. It may be that the artist, his own most available model, used himself to practice poses and expressions he might employ with other sitters. There are also indications that Johnson--a generally extroverted and genial club man--turned inward during this critical transition in his career, taking stock of himself and his relation to the artist and sitters with whom he socialized and sympathized.

This group of later self-portraits varies in format from small bust-length studies to an imposing full-length canvas dated 1891 (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC). Though hardly identical, the works relate closely among themselves in terms of pose, expression, background, and lighting. In view of the authoritative full-length portrait of 1891, it is conceivable that Johnson approached self-portraiture as a project akin to a major genre painting: by assembling studies, refining compositions, settling on a major statement, but bringing favorite sketches up to finish along the way. The smaller portraits allow the twentieth century viewer a glimpse of Johnson's working method and preliminary ideas. Johnson was an artist accustomed to observation rather than introspection, however, and these smaller works do not appear as investigations of different states of mind or explorations of ways to suggest status or accomplishment; they seem as refinements on a pre-formed notion of identity, encounters of a confident, yet reserved, self with his image in a mirror. Still, as evidenced by Self-Portrait, Johnson could convey psychological presence and technical artistry within a restrained and seemingly straightforward likeness.

Self-Portrait shows Johnson as a man in his late 50s or early 60s, with a high forehead, ruddy cheeks, and gray hair. He wears a brown jacket over a white shirt and dark tie; a stroke and dab of yellow paint at the lower right of the canvas indicate a watch chain, and by extension, the subject's comfortably wide girth. The attire seems formal, but 1890s photographs of Johnson in his studio indicate that the artist dressed in this way for work, and the depiction accords well with the painter Will Low's description of Johnson as "robust, kindly petulant in manner, florid of complexion, study of figure." (quoted by Hills, p. 82) The three-quarter turn of Johnson's head and the alignment of the left side of his face with the sharp point of his goatee serve to elongate the head, making it appear thinner than it does in most other portraits; this appearance also suggests that the portrait dates from the early to mid 1880s, before the artist gained even more weight. Johnson's head is strongly lit, with the highest light falling on the forehead; from the dark brown, featureless background and from the darker browns of the jacket, this head emerges and confronts the viewer with a powerful presence. The ruddy cheeks, though an aspect of Johnson's everyday appearance as Will Low reported, seem to bespeak the artist's enduring vitality, a hearty vigor uncompromised by his graying hair and reinforced by his erect posture and ample waist.

The artist's technique is readily apparent in the lower half of the canvas, in which the warm red-brown ground layer is still visible below several quickly-painted strokes of black that define the outlines of the jacket. The portrait seems somewhat unfinished, not only because of the sketchy indications of the sitter's clothing and body or the canvas's lack of signature or initials, but also because the head, although treated differently, is defined by large, grainy, summary strokes of pigment without the finer, blended strokes one is accustomed to seeing in a finished Johnson painting. John Baur reminds us that Johnson was experimenting with technique in the middle of the 1880s:

An Earnest Pupil [dated 1881 or 1884]...is unusual in that
it reflects an experiment which Johnson was evidently making at
this time with a new handling of his medium. Instead of the
broad strokes and relatively thin paint of [A Glass with the
Squire, 1880], he has developed here a heavy and peculiarly
granular impasto, especially in the figures. The effect of this
rather tricky technique, combined with strong chiaroscuro, is to
bring the principal forms into strong relief against the back-
ground. The same method is to be found in a few portraits also
(e.g. no. 204 [this self-portrait]), but he seems to have
abandoned it soon thereafter in favor of a style which was the
more logical outgrowth of his earlier manner. (Eastman
Johnson, pp. 23-24)

With such technical experiments in the 1880s, Johnson kept pace with the generation of artists returning from their studies in Munich or Paris, who reveled in stylish technique and felt little responsibility to render their subjects "truthfully." Johnson's technique, of course, was based on older models, both his admiration of Rembrandt and his studies with Thomas Couture in Paris; moreover, with the draftsmanship that was surely second nature by this point, Johnson rendered convincing form and credible likeness even with summary, self-conscious strokes. This willingness of an older artist to experiment with technique while remaining true to an established mode of representation earned Johnson respect and praise both from the "younger men" and from Johnson's own generation of painters.

There is a very private aspect to this artistically confident self-portrait, however, that is far removed from the acclaim of Johnson's peers. With his head brightly illuminated and face turned almost fully frontal, Johnson addresses his viewer as he confronted his own image in the mirror, with a forthright stare. But his expression is illegible. The mouth is invisible beneath the shadow of a handlebar moustache, and the eyes are black-brown patches beneath the forehead's white highlights. We may see the artist in this presentation, but we will not know the man, so the portrait seems to say. This reading might be construed as a misunderstanding of an unfinished rendering, were it not for another self-portrait title, executed at about the same time. In this work, Johnson portrayed himself wearing the painter's black eyeshade, a reference to the artist's craft and perhaps an allusion to Chardin's great pastel self-portrait of 1775 (Cabinet des Dessins, Museé du Louvre, Paris, Cabinet des Dessins). Yet Chardin's steady, amiable gaze, peering out from beneath both spectacles and eyeshade, is direct and accessible despite two levels of remove. Johnson's gaze, in contrast, is not to be found. It is clear from these portraits of the early to mid 1880s at least, that Johnson felt a tension between the presentation and the revelation of self.

Johnson apparently never exhibited any of his self-portraits. Those he did not keep in his studio or present to his men's clubs, he gave to artist friends--fellow artists such as the portraitist George P.A. Healy, or the genre painter and Couture student John W. Ehninger, who had likewise survived a difficult century. Nor were any self-portraits auctioned off in the Johnson estate sale of 1907. Self-Portrait remained in Johnson's family until the middle of the twentieth century, further testimony to the private nature of this otherwise forceful image.

Christie's is grateful to Sally Mills for contributing this catalogue essay.

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work being compiled by Dr. Patricia Hills.