Warming Her Hands

Teresa A. Carbone writes of the present work, "On his return to New York late in the year, Johnson must have experienced a distinct change in mood from the frenetic enthusiasm that attended the initial rallying and send-off of Union troops in the spring and summer of 1861. A series of disastrous losses had undermined the common belief that the war would be brief and the Union victory decisive, renewing doubts in the cause. By the end of the year, New York's newly elected Republican mayor, George Opdyke, escalated fears of foreign attack on the nearly defenseless and cash-poor city. It was in this atmosphere that Johnson painted Warming Her Hands, his single entry in the National Academy annual of 1862. In this small and touchingly pathetic scene, a young girl in a tattered cape and hood attempts to warm herself behind the stove in what appears to be an artist's studio. The calendar on the wall, still turned to the year 1861, suggests that the primary occupant has been absent, and that the girl--a daughter or model--was amoung the many children temporarily abandoned during the war. Clearly susceptible to the picture's mood, a writer for the New York Times declared it 'singularly beautiful.' Warming Her Hands and Johnson's many works like it were those for which he was likened to Édouard Frére (1819-1886), a French painter first acclaimed in Paris for his peasant subjects in the early 1850s...In paintings like Warming Her Hands, Johnson embraced a soft touch and delicate breadth akin to Frére's." (Eastman Johnson: Painting America, New York, 1999, p. 54)

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