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Lot Essay
Renowned for his portraiture and his genre paintings depicting urban and rural subjects, Eastman Johnson only briefly turned to Western themes in his art, beginning in 1856 with a visit to the frontier regions of Lake Superior. While there he became acquainted with the Anishinabe or Ojibwe Indians, and he began to formulate an idea for a major work depicting the tribe.
After his return to Washington, D.C., Johnson resolved to travel west again the following year, and arrived back among the Ojibwe tribe in the summer of 1857. As noted by Patricia Hills, "He explained his motives in a letter to his former patron Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had just written to commission a portrait of his young daughters: 'One might reasonably wonder what attraction that wild region can have for an artist, in comparison with such advantages as would result to me from your kind and flattering offer, the patronage of the most celebrated in the most refined of places. Perhaps I cannot entirely justify it, but in a visit to that country last season I found so much of the picturesque, & of a character so much to my taste & in my line, that I then determined to employ this summer or a portion of it in making sketches of Frontier life, a national feature of our present condition & a field for art that is full of interest, & freshness & pleasing nature, & yet that has been but little treated. My chief desire is to paint pictures. In Europe I worked six or seven years with diligence & zeal to this end, sacrificing much, & my wish is that it may come to something.'" (Eastman Johnson, Painting America, Brooklyn, New York, 2000, p. 36)
"Johnson's emphatic desire to 'paint pictures,'" continues Hills, "demonstrates that he had goals beyond portraiture; and he surely expected a sympathetic response from the poet who two years earlier had published the narrative poem The Song of Hiawatha, which was largely based on an Anishinabe story. Longfellow, who had never traveled west, had taken the details of his narrative from the writings of the seminal ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), whose work was based in part on information provided by his Ojibwe-Irish wife, Jane Johnson Schoolcraft."
"Johnson was one of a host of American artists to consider Indian subjects at mid-century. Prompted in part by literary manifestations like Longfellow's, the call for indigenous American subject matter, and more specifically Indian themes in the visual arts, had been in the air at the time of Johnson's return from Europe. In January 1856, just months after his return, the Crayon published a piece in which American artists were encouraged to make haste in recording the Indian: 'Soon the last red man will have faded forever from his native land, and those who come after will trust to our scanty records for their knowledge of his habits and appearance.' "
"On his return west, Johnson settled in for an extended stay in the more remote area of Grand Portage (150 miles north of Superior, at the Canadian border). There he completed a fascinating body of imagery of the native Anishinabe (Ojibwe) in preparation for an ambitious painting. About a hundred and fifty Anishinabe lived in the Grand Portage area in the early nineteenth century, and a temporary summer village was maintained at Grand Portage Bay. Even after the circumscription of the reservation in 1854, Grand Portage served the Anishinabe primarily as a summer fishing ground and harvest site for wild rice and cranberries in the early fall; hunting and maple sugaring took place farther inland in the winter and spring" (Eastman Johnson, Painting Americas, pp. 36-37). Along with another related work in the collection of St. Louis County Historical Society in Duluth, Minnesota, the present work, Ojibwe Encampment, was likely created as documentation for Johnson's planned larger composition, which would remain uncompleted. Ojibwe Encampment records with little idealization the somewhat tumbledown appearance of this seasonal Indian encampment. It is a rare record of the frontier that was rapidly disappearing, and an almost unique record of the Ojibwe tribe by one of finest American painters of the nineteenth century.
After his return to Washington, D.C., Johnson resolved to travel west again the following year, and arrived back among the Ojibwe tribe in the summer of 1857. As noted by Patricia Hills, "He explained his motives in a letter to his former patron Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had just written to commission a portrait of his young daughters: 'One might reasonably wonder what attraction that wild region can have for an artist, in comparison with such advantages as would result to me from your kind and flattering offer, the patronage of the most celebrated in the most refined of places. Perhaps I cannot entirely justify it, but in a visit to that country last season I found so much of the picturesque, & of a character so much to my taste & in my line, that I then determined to employ this summer or a portion of it in making sketches of Frontier life, a national feature of our present condition & a field for art that is full of interest, & freshness & pleasing nature, & yet that has been but little treated. My chief desire is to paint pictures. In Europe I worked six or seven years with diligence & zeal to this end, sacrificing much, & my wish is that it may come to something.'" (Eastman Johnson, Painting America, Brooklyn, New York, 2000, p. 36)
"Johnson's emphatic desire to 'paint pictures,'" continues Hills, "demonstrates that he had goals beyond portraiture; and he surely expected a sympathetic response from the poet who two years earlier had published the narrative poem The Song of Hiawatha, which was largely based on an Anishinabe story. Longfellow, who had never traveled west, had taken the details of his narrative from the writings of the seminal ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), whose work was based in part on information provided by his Ojibwe-Irish wife, Jane Johnson Schoolcraft."
"Johnson was one of a host of American artists to consider Indian subjects at mid-century. Prompted in part by literary manifestations like Longfellow's, the call for indigenous American subject matter, and more specifically Indian themes in the visual arts, had been in the air at the time of Johnson's return from Europe. In January 1856, just months after his return, the Crayon published a piece in which American artists were encouraged to make haste in recording the Indian: 'Soon the last red man will have faded forever from his native land, and those who come after will trust to our scanty records for their knowledge of his habits and appearance.' "
"On his return west, Johnson settled in for an extended stay in the more remote area of Grand Portage (150 miles north of Superior, at the Canadian border). There he completed a fascinating body of imagery of the native Anishinabe (Ojibwe) in preparation for an ambitious painting. About a hundred and fifty Anishinabe lived in the Grand Portage area in the early nineteenth century, and a temporary summer village was maintained at Grand Portage Bay. Even after the circumscription of the reservation in 1854, Grand Portage served the Anishinabe primarily as a summer fishing ground and harvest site for wild rice and cranberries in the early fall; hunting and maple sugaring took place farther inland in the winter and spring" (Eastman Johnson, Painting Americas, pp. 36-37). Along with another related work in the collection of St. Louis County Historical Society in Duluth, Minnesota, the present work, Ojibwe Encampment, was likely created as documentation for Johnson's planned larger composition, which would remain uncompleted. Ojibwe Encampment records with little idealization the somewhat tumbledown appearance of this seasonal Indian encampment. It is a rare record of the frontier that was rapidly disappearing, and an almost unique record of the Ojibwe tribe by one of finest American painters of the nineteenth century.