Maine native Eastman Johnson was one of the most significant painters of the nineteenth century and was instrumental in the development of genre painting in the United States. He established his reputation in New York with art that depicted everyday life. At the height of his career in the 1860s and 1870s, he often turned to his home state for subject matter, creating works that portrayed various aspects of rural experience. Eastman Johnson and Maine will unite the artist’s paintings of domestic scenes, barn interiors, woodcutters, and the annual rite of maple sugaring, which collectively illuminate agrarian life in the years during and after the Civil War. This focused exhibition is the first solo presentation of Johnson’s art in Maine and also celebrates the bicentennial of the artist’s birth.

Sponsors:

Eastman Johnson and Maine is organized by Sarah Humphreville, Lunder Curator of American Art, with Patricia Hills, Director of the Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné Project, serving as scholarly advisor.

Image Credit:

A Boy in the Maine Woods, c. 1868. Oil on board, 12 x 20 1/8 in. (30.5 x 51.1 cm). Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; bequest of Mrs. Elizabeth B. Noyce 97.3.23