Eastman Johnson

(1824-1906)

Crossing a Stream (Pig-a-Back) 21 1/8 x 17in

Footnotes

Provenance
The artist.
General Benjamin Rush Cowen, Washington, D.C., circa 1870s.
Mrs. William Wyatt Breckinridge, granddaughter of the above, Montrose, Alabama, by descent, by 1954.
Mrs. J.A. Barnard, New York.
Kennedy Galleries, Inc., New York.
Private collection, New York, acquired from the above, 1964.
Babcock Galleries, New York.
Private collection, Massachusetts, acquired from the above, 2000.
By descent to the present owner.

Exhibited
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Artist's Fund Society, February 1867, no. 71 (as Crossing the Brook).
New York, Kennedy Galleries, Inc., American Masters: 18th and 19th Centuries, March 14-April 7, 1973, p. 30, no. 27, illustrated (as Crossing the Brook).
New York, Kennedy Galleries, Inc., Art of America: Selected Painting and Sculpture 1770-1981, November 11, 1981-January 15, 1982, n.p., no. 4, illustrated.
New York, Babcock Galleries, From Light of Distant Skies: A Selection of 19th Century American Paintings, April 8-August 11, 2010, no. 8 (as Crossing the Stream).
New York, Driscoll Babcock Galleries, Refuge and Remembrance: Landscape Painting in the Civil War Era, May 16-June 22, 2013 (as Crossing the Stream).

Literature
H.T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, New York, 1870, p. 471.
C.E. Clement and L. Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works, vol. 2, Boston, Massachusetts, 1889, p. 11.
P. Hills, The Genre Painting of Eastman Johnson: The Sources and Development of His Style and Themes, New York, 1977, p. 135 (as Pig-a-Back).

The present lot will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work being prepared by Dr. Patricia Hills and is accompanied by her letter of authenticity. We wish to thank her for her assistance cataloguing this lot.

Eastman Johnson is most famously known for his paintings depicting mid-nineteenth century American life. Crossing a Stream was painted in 1866, one year after the end to the country's hard fought Civil War. Americans reeling from the realities of life after war were overwhelmed by reconstruction efforts, a daunting task among a changing economy and the emancipation of a large population of slaves. The present work differs from his journalistic paintings of the day and reflects a transition to more nostalgic images that Johnson and fellow artists began to favor in the 1860s. (P. Hills, et al, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, Brooklyn, New York, 1999, p. 159)

In an excerpt from Patricia Hills' letter regarding and accompanying the present work she observes, "There is a wonderful translucency of the water in the pond with the reflection of the girl and young boy delicately delineated in the water. The green paint representing the vegetation of plants and moss on the hill has been delicately scumbled to indicate sunshine coming through the trees. One also perceives the darkened shadows throughout the trees in the background. The features of the girl are indistinct, which is quite typical, although the boy's features are more strongly delineated."

Crossing a Stream relates to another painting completed by the artist one year earlier, in 1865, titled Gathering Lilies, in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. A young woman crouches to collect water lilies suspended on the water's surface. Much like the present lot, Crossing a Stream, both women have ventured onto a small peninsula of rock which disappears into the calm waters. Their downward gaze admires the stream that surrounds them, greeted by green moss blanketing the tough stone beneath them. The viewer is at once met with the central figures, the sun highlights flashes of white on the small boy being carried on her back, suddenly the intimate detail of the vegetation encompassing them decorates our view. The work is as much a nature study as it is a genre scene.

At the time the present work was executed, Johnson spent much time with fellow painters and friends gathering regularly at the East Thirteenth Street apartments and the Tenth Street Studio building in New York. (T.A. Carbone, et al., Eastman Johnson: Painting America, Brooklyn, New York, 1999, p. 66) One can see the interest this circle of artists might have ignited in Johnson to pursue landscape subject matter in greater depth. Crossing a Stream merges the aesthetic appreciation of art-for-art's-sake with Johnson's assumed responsibility to document a country at the dawn of a new era.