Eastman Johnson

American Realist painter Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) was a co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and one of the leading genre painters of the 19th century. Born Jonathan Eastman Johnson in Lovell, Maine, his career began in 1840 when his father apprenticed him to a Boston lithographer. By 1859, he had established a studio in New York City and secured his reputation with "Negro Life at the South" (1859), popularly called "Old Kentucky Home," exhibited at the National Academy of Design. His later works show the influence of 17th-century Dutch masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; contemporaries called him "The American Rembrandt."

Johnson's "A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves" (c. 1862) stands as one of the most powerful images of the Civil War era. It depicts an enslaved family, presumably father, mother, and child, galloping on horseback toward Union lines at dawn. Johnson claimed to have witnessed this actual event near Manassas, Virginia, on March 2, 1862, just days before Confederate forces retreated. The absence of white figures makes it virtually unique among liberation subjects of the period. These African Americans act as agents of their own freedom, each family member looking in a different direction: the father ahead to the future, the mother back to the past, the child down at the present.

Johnson painted portraits of prominent Americans including Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His Ojibwe paintings remained unsold during his lifetime and now belong to the Tweed Museum of Art in Minnesota. "A Ride for Liberty" hangs at the Brooklyn Museum. Other works are held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.