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Eastman Johnson: Paintings
and Drawings of the Lake Superior Ojibwe
through October 29, 2006
A remarkable but little
known group of paintings and drawings by Eastman Johnson is on view through
October 29, 2006 at the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota Duluth.
Despite their inclusion in the Brooklyn Museum's 1999 exhibition and book
on the artist, Johnson's charcoal and oil portraits of the Lake Superior
Ojibwe have remained in relative obscurity, much as they did during his
lifetime. Principle among the reasons for the lack of knowledge about this
group of works, is the fact that Johnson himself stashed the drawings and
painting sketches away in his studio soon after he completed them in 1856-57.
Despite the urgings of several of his artist-friends, he never expanded
the Ojibwe subjects into larger, more finished paintings, like his later
maple sugaring and cranberry harvest scenes, which would have fixed them
in the popular imagination, and made them more available to his patrons.
Soon after Johnson's death in 1906, the Ojibwe images were
shown at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where they were seen
by Richard Teller Crane, a Chicago elevator manufacturer whose company had
interests in Duluth, Minnesota. Recognizing their importance to the region,
Crane purchased them from Johnson's widow, and offered them as a gift to
the City of Duluth, where they have remained since 1908. In 1929, they became
part of the collection of the St. Louis County Historical Society. This
is the first time that the entire group of Johnson's Lake Superior Ojibwe
images, numbering 22 charcoal drawings and 14 oil paintings, has been exhibited
in many years.[1]
Johnson's rural genre scenes have come to define pre- and
post-Civil War American life almost more than any other artist. Along with
his portraits of literary and political figures and definitive scenes of
rural life in his native New England, Johnson depicted blacks in the south,
and his lesser-known Native American subjects, with an astute and sympathetic
eye. Returning from studies in Germany and Holland in 1855, sought a uniquely
American subject to advance his art. Fate would have it that his sister
Sarah had married William Henry Newton, whose property interests in the
upper midwest brought them there in the 1850s. Johnson's younger brother
Reuben had also moved to Superior, Wisconsin, where he operated a sawmill.
With earnings from portrait commissions and a stake from his father to invest
in land, Eastman Johnson spent the summers of 1856 and 1857 around western
Lake Superior. One of his charcoal sketches from the period shows him, looking
somewhat like a young Abe Lincoln, seated in the cabin he had built on Pokegema
Bay. As a guide, Johnson enlisted Stephen Boonga, a mixed-blood African-American
and Ojibwe man, to help him tour by canoe to the trading center of Grand
Portage, and to the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior's south shore. In and
around the fast-growing cities of Duluth and Superior, and moreso in Grand
Portage, Johnson met the Ojibwe subjects whose portraits and activities
are depicted in these charcoal and oil sketches.
The exhibition at the Tweed Museum of Art also features
a group of Fond du Lac treaty portraits by James Otto Lewis and Charles
Bird King, along with mid-19th century maps of the region, and Ojibwe artifacts,
all from the Richard and Dorothy Nelson Collection of American Indian Art.[2] These artifacts, among them a cradleboard,
birchbark containers with scratchwork designs, and outstanding examples
of Ojibwe floral and geometric beadwork, verify the truthfulness of Johnson's
direct observations of Ojibwe women, children and elders. The posed formality
and the overlay of Europeanized features and dress seen in Lewis' and King's
government-commissioned documents, stands in sharp contrast to Johnson's
intimate portraits. Johnson's images are of individuals, not types, and
always present their subjects in a manner that appears both casual and dignified,
an observation that has been verified by the comments of many Native American
visitors who have seen the exhibition in Duluth.
Carl Gawboy, a contemporary artist and a member of the
Bois Fort Band of Minnesota Ojibwe, has used Johnson's Ojibwe images as
a touchstone since he was a student in the 1970s. Several of Gawboy's works
are included in the exhibition, including one from a cycle of murals Gawboy
was commissioned to paint for the Superior Public Library, which takes Johnson's
1856 View of Superior charcoal as a starting point. In his version,
Gawboy adds Stephen Boonga, his Ojibwe wife, and Johnson himself, seated
on a tree stump sketching the scene.
The Tweed Museum of Art is pleased to offer the public
an opportunity to view this little-known aspect of Eastman Johnson's work,
and to help in the construction of a contemporary context for these rare
historical images of the Ojibwe people, who still proudly live in our region.
Notes:
1. In recent years, the Tweed Museum of Art at the University
of Minnesota Duluth has been assisting the St. Louis County Historical by
storing and planning for the conservation needs of the Eastman Johnson collection.
2. The Richard and Dorothy Nelson Collection of American
Indian Art features hundreds of outstanding examples of beadwork, quillwork,
birchbark containers, baskets and functional artifacts from Ojibwe and Eastern
Woodlands groups, spanning the century between 1850-1950. Exhibited and
published by the Tweed Musuem of Art as Shared Passions: Richard and
Dorothy Nelson Collection of American Indian Art, the Nelson collection
will be on view at the Southeast Missouri Regional Museum in Cape Girardeau,
October 10-November 19, 2006. A fully illustrated book of the Nelson collection
is available through the Tweed Museum of Art, www.d.umn.edu/tma
Label text from the exhibition:
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Landscape of Superior, Wisconsin, 1857
- charcoal, chalk, and gouache on paper, 16 _ x 22 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.21
-
- Rich in historical content, this view of Superior, Wisconsin was sketched
from George Stuntz' trading post on Minnesota Point (now Park Point) in
1857. The town's first hotel, the Nicollet House, is seen in the background,
and the large building emitting smoke is the sawmill at the lumber yard
at Detroit Pier which was run by Eastman Johnson's brother, Reuben. The
lake steamer on the left is the Lady Elgin, which floundered with three-hundred
people on board in 1860.
-
- Artist Carl Gawboy used Johnson's view of Superior as the basis for
one of thirty-five mural sized paintings about the area's history, which
can be seen in the Superior Public Library. Reproduced here, Gawboy's version
pictures Johnson sitting on a tree stump, drawing the scene. Standing beside
him is Stephen Bonga, a freed slave of Native and black descent, who worked
as Johnson's guide and interpreter on trips as far as Isle Royale in Michigan,
and the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior's south shore.
-
-
- Carl Gawboy
- (American, Boise Fort Ojibwe, b. Cloquet, Minesota, 1942.
- Lives and works in Duluth, MN)
- Eastman Johnson's Woman, 1972-1995
- ink and paint on board, with string, glue and cardboard,
- 26 _ x 14 _"
- Tweed Museum of Art, Sax Purchase Fund, D2006.x34
-
- "Eastman Johnson's Woman was done in 1972 while I was a
student at the University of Montana. It was a paper block print, and several
prints were run off the block. I saved the block and added acrylic highlights
to it in the mid-1990s, and had it framed.
-
- My interest in printmaking began in the 1960s while I was an art student
at UMD. There was a great deal of pressure on those of us who wanted to
do representational art. Abstract expressionism was "in." The
photorealism of Chuck Close and the prairie realists were to come later.
I found that I could do realistic images in printmaking class, so I took
many independent study courses. At Montana I was still in that printmaking
mode, although I later turned all my attention to painting.
-
- The influences of Eastman Johnson on my imagery of Indians is well
explained in the PBS-WDSE documentary on the Eastman Johnson Collection
of the St. Louis County Historical Society." (Video can be seen in
this exhibition.)
- - Carl Gawboy
-
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Grand Portage, 1856 - 57
- oil on canvas, 9 x 19 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.05
-
- Johnson found a village of birch bark wigwams and log buildings at
Grand Portage, a busy summer gathering place for the Ojibwe people of the
region. He pictured the structures carefully, but just sketched in dozens
of Ojibwe figures.
-
- The artist could provide detail to these figures later, working from
his portrait drawings. Some of the log buildings were warehouses where
goods were held for annual distribution to the Grand Portage band; the
one near the center was an early mission church of log construction, identifiable
by a cross at its peak.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Canoe of Indians, 1856 - 57
- oil on canvas, 17 _ x 38 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection. Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.11
-
- The classic birch bark canoe of the Woodland Indians was the Ojibwe
mode of travel along the lakes and rivers of the North Shore. People who
recalled Eastman Johnson's visit to Lake Superior said he learned to paddle
a canoe skillfully. The largest of Johnson's Grand Portage paintings, this
is also one of the most puzzling: the perspective and the placement of
the figures are too clumsy to make the scene as convincing as his individual
portraits. As you can see by comparing the faces, the painting may never
have been finished. Yet it captures in full color an essential part of
Great Lakes life.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Studies of an Ojibwe Man, 1856 - 57
- oil on canvas, 7 x 12"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.06
-
- This unidentified man intrigued Johnson so much that he portrayed him
in two poses and two moods: the reserved profile at left, and the livelier
expression in the eyes and mouth at right. Johnson's years in Rembrandt's
home city, The Hague, gave him the opportunity to learn from the old masters
of art how to paint such expressive faces, wherever he might find them-from
the cities of Europe to the shores of the Great Lakes.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Ojibwe Wigwam at Grand Portage, 1856 - 57
- oil on canvas, 10 14 x 15 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.10
-
- This wigwam of birch bark rolls, tied to a framework of wooden poles,
was a typical Ojibwe summer residence. Made from materials readily found
in the north woods, it was easily transported when its occupants moved
with the seasons from summer fishing camps, to wild ricing camps in the
fall, hunting camps in winter, and the sugarbush in spring. The wigwam
also offered Johnson an inviting subject for his skills. He depicted the
sunlight on rough bark textures outside and the cool shadows within, where
two women sit on cedar mats.
-
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Sha wen ne gun, 1857
- charcoal on paper, 7 _ x 7 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.20
-
- Portrait drawings were Eastman Johnson's earliest specialty, as a youngster
in New England and an artist-in-training in Washington, D. C. Pictures
like this show his mastery of the form; strokes of charcoal show the shapes
and textures of the young woman's face and hair, while touches of white
chalk mark highlights on her brow and the beadwork of her necklace. Several
of Johnson's drawings have names in Ojibwe. Since it was not a written
language, however, spellings can vary, leading to confusion over the identification
of some sitters.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Midosuay beek 1856 - 57
- charcoal on paper, 20 _ x 10 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.18
-
- Family groups of parents, children, and elders were a mainstay of Eastman
Johnson's art. Several of his pictures at Grand Portage are early examples
of his interest in picturing people together; this young woman carries
her child with a serious (and perhaps weary) look. Her clothing combines
a traditional strap dress with a blanket worn like a skirt -- a typical
blend of native styles with trade goods. Johnson's exacting technique in
depicting the faces and clothes did not succeed from top to bottom: note
how he erased and re-drew her feet, to find the proper position of the
figure on his drawing paper.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Log Cabin Interior, Pokegama Bay, 1856
- charcoal on paper, 8 _ x 10 1/4"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.26
-
- On his first visit to Lake Superior in 1856, Johnson built a cabin
of cedar logs at Pokegama Bay opposite Duluth. From this base he explored
Lake Superior's shores, the Apostle Islands, and Isle Royale before spending
the winter back at his cabin. This has long been considered a self-portrait
of the artist at rest.
-
-
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Camp Scene at Grand Portage, ca. 1857
- Eastman Johnson (1824-1906)
- oil on canvas, 4 _ x 13"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.01
-
- Looking from the shore of Lake Superior toward Mount Rose, Eastman
Johnson painted a busy community at Grand Portage. Canoes and wigwams of
birch bark reflect the traditional ways of the Ojibwe people. Log buildings
thought to be warehouses for government annuities hint at Grand Portage's
more recent status as a reservation. While Johnson was primarily a painter
of people, he was also able to capture a scene and a season, as this view
in the full green of summer shows.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Ojibwe Boy, 1856 - 57
- charcoal on paper, 5 x 4 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.24
-
- Lost in thought, this boy posed for Johnson in an unusual cap-a reminder,
perhaps, of Grand Portage's fur trade history and the exchange of goods
and cultures for a century before Eastman Johnson's arrival there.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Ojibwe Boy, 1856 - 57
- oil on canvas, 7 _ x 4 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.03
-
- Johnson's interest in portraying childhood cut across cultures; among
his most popular works were paintings of European and American kids at
play. Here he captured the likeness of an unidentified Ojibwe boy, gazing
shyly from the shadows at the painter.
-
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Ojibwe Camp Scene, 1856 - 57
- oil on canvas, 9 _ x 11 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.04
-
- In this study Johnson spanned generations of Ojibwe, from the infant
wrapped tightly in a cradleboard to the women (parents or grandparents)
at center. The painting was no doubt intended to plot out a composition
for later reference: both the figures at center and the background landscape
are roughly sketched in, offering us a glimpse not only of family life
at Grand Portage, but of the artist's working methods as well.
-
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Ojibwe Women, 1856 - 57
- oil on canvas, 19 _ x 20 1/8"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.13
-
- This canvas brings together several figures in an almost random order,
suggesting that Johnson painted them to document poses and clothing for
future paintings. The women wear colorful strap dresses, moccasins, and
jewelry, all of which would be useful visual data for an artist of Johnson's
time to use in his studio.
-
- In the background at right is gathering of people-perhaps for a funeral,
as the ridge on which they stand is an old Ojibwe cemetery.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Study for Minnehaha, 1856 57
- charcoal on paper, 15 _ x 11 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.30
-
- This imaginative composition is Johnson's interpretation of the native
woman who was a leading character in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's long
poem of 1855, The Song of Hiawatha. The artist drew her Ojibwe clothing
carefully, using the strap dress and moccasins he acquired in Minnesota
(now also in the St. Louis County Historical Society's collections). But
he treated her face in a romantic and generalized way: unlike the real
people in his Grand Portage portraits, this figure is as imaginary as the
name that Longfellow gave her.
-
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Minnehaha, 1856 - 57
- pastel on paper, 13 _ x 11"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.9
-
- The most finished of his Grand Portage pictures, this pastel takes
its mood and title from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem, The
Song of Hiawatha. The picture, like the poem, is a romantic compilation
of nature, native lore, and imagination, with the figure of Minnehaha lost
in thought in a forest glade. Her dress and the log seat she faces would
have been common Ojibwe objects. Johnson collected such a dress at Grand
Portage, in fact, using it and his studies of Ojibwe women as models for
this work.
-
- After receiving training in a Boston lithography shop as a teenager,
Johnson moved to Washington, D.C. where he created charcoal portraits of
notable figures like John Quincy Adams, Dolly Madison, Mrs. Alexander Hamilton,
and Daniel Webster. He then moved back to Boston in 1846, where he met
and drew portraits of literary figures Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Longfellow was also a Maine native,
and his Hiawatha, published in 1855, along with the directly observed
Ojibwe drawings Johnson was doing a year later, obviously inspired his
Hiawatha images.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Cabin Interior (Our Cabin, Pokegama Bay, Lake Superior), 1856
- charcoal on paper, 8 _ x 10 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, 96.9.1
-
- Like the drawing thought to include Johnson's self portrait, this picture
shows the cabin he built on Pokegama Bay on his first visit to the region.
The neat, well-furnished cabin served as his base of operations while he
explored Lake Superior, and was still standing a decade later. Johnson's
guide was a man named Stephen Bonga, a freed slave who had married an Ojibwe
woman. Together they traveled by canoe around Fond du Lac, the Apostle
Islands, and to Grand Portage.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Ojibwe Girl, 1856 - 57
- oil on canvas, 9 _ x 9 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.7
-
- A study in both character and lighting, this painting was probably
intended to preserve a pose, a face, and a setting for Johnson's future
reference. The weathered wall and well-worn clothing were the kind of picturesque
details that a genre painter like Johnson sought. The contrast between
bright sunlight, just touching the toe of the girl's moccasin, with the
cool shadows in which she sits, further reveals the artist's skills in
capturing passing effects.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- William Newton, 1856
- oil on canvas, 39 _ x 32 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Alice and Martha
Peyton, 78.449
-
- Eastman Johnson's painting of his sister's husband William Newton is
a classic example of mid-19th century portraiture: a skilled blend of accurate
likeness, attention to detail, and a hint of the sitter's station in life
in his face, body language, and clothing. Newton was a businessman who
recognized the potential of land at the head of the Great Lakes and became
one of the founders of the town of Superior. The portrait's size, crisp
lighting and textures, and lively expression suggest how Johnson might
have developed his Grand Portage studies if he had used them for finished
paintings in his later career.
-
- On his first trip to Lake Superior in 1856, Johnson also painted a
portrait of his sister, Sarah Osgood Johnson Newton. Thought to have been
painted in the couple's Superior home, Sarah's portrait now resides in
a private collection.
-
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Kenne Waw Be Mint, 1856 - 57
- charcoal on paper, 8 x 7 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.29
-
- A translation of this man's name is He Who is Observed -- an
apt phrase for a face presented by the artist in such perfect profile.
Johnson's drawing skill is evident in the firm outlines of the face, with
smudges of charcoal that mark the shadows of his cheekbones and textures
of his hair. The clothing was of lesser interest here to Johnson, who merely
suggested the arms and shoulder in lighter charcoal strokes.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Wigemar Wasung, 1856 - 57
- charcoal and chalk on paper, 10 _ x 8"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.14
-
- Johnson drew Wigemar Wasung's face and dress as carefully as a society
portraitist would portray a socialite in her jewels back East. While the
choker, ribbons, and headband were typical adornments for Ojibwe women,
the feather in her hair was not-it may be the artist's addition to the
picture, a nod to the stereotypical Indian dress Johnson's audiences expected.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Sesong Enik, 1857
- oil on canvas, 10 x 8"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.15
-
- Johnson' portraits often suggest an untold story: here an old man sits
with downcast eyes, alone with his memories. His red sash adds a formal
air, but the position of head and body seem clumsy. In a small study like
this the artist could work on such problems, which would be resolved in
a later, larger painting.
-
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Studies of Ojibwe Woman and Child, 1856 - 57
- charcoal and crayon on paper, 10 x 5 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.16
-
- This double drawing combines the firmly drawn profile of Midosuay Beek,
a young Ojibwe woman, with a rough sketch of a seated woman and child --
perhaps the same person in two poses. Compare this sheet with another drawing
of the same woman in this collection: the care with which Johnson has drawn
her eyes and chin on this double drawing is there developed into a fully
realized pose.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Studies of Kenne waw be mint and Sesong Enik, 1857
- charcoal on paper, 20 _ x 10 _"
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.22
-
- This page of carefully drawn portraits evokes the artist at work, perhaps
finishing one head and turning his paper for space to begin another. Johnson
portrayed both men in other pictures made at Grand Portage -- Kenne waw
be mint in a profile drawing, and Sesong Enik in a small oil painting.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Ojibwe Boy, 1856 - 57
- charcoal on paper,
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.25
-
- This picture is unusual among the Grand Portage portraits, in both
style and pose. Johnson's charcoal strokes are gentler than in most of
the drawings, creating a soft-focus effect. The boy returns the artist's
stare, looking back curiously; a suggestion, perhaps, that the people of
Grand Portage found this visitor from the East as interesting as he found
them.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson
- Ojibwe Man, 1856 - 57
- charcoal on paper,
- St. Louis County Historical Society Collection, Gift of Richard Teller
Crane, 62.181.32
-
- Johnson's profiles of unidentified Ojibwe people reveal his mastery
of portrait drawing at its most basic and exacting. He drew each subject's
face in perfect outline, adding shading with softer strokes to give a lifelike
and rounded appearance. We do not know all their names, but these faces
preserve the spirit of the men and women Johnson met at Grand Portage.
-
-
- Eastman Johnson