The Chimney Corner

A gifted draftsman, the major artistic Spokesman for post-Civil War rural America, and a figure of wide acquaintance and influence in New York art circles, Eastman Johnson enjoyed a long, productive, and distinguished career. His talent emerged early in portrait studies done in Lovell, Maine, his birthplace, and progressed rapidly through training in Dusseldorf and Paris. When he returned to this country in 1855, he was as advanced technically as any other artist of his generation, and his work continued to grow in breadth and power through the next three decades.

The Chimney Corner builds on lessons Johnson had learned well by 1863. His grasp of form and contour was assured, his figures possess an inner authority, dominating well-defined, Dutch-like spaces, and his brush moves with a broad energy that heightens contrasts of light, color, and texture. In the case of The Chimney Corner, the brushwork almost alone carries the muted physical impact of flesh tones, coarse clothing, and uneven interior surfaces. One senses a lingering touch of Dusseldorf in the somber palette, but more of Thomas Couture, Johnson’s French master, in the painterly manipulation of form and deftly mixed highlights.

Johnson’s picture of a lone black man seated in a rustic interior probably harks back to scenes he had witnessed in Washington, D.C., shortly after his return from abroad. His first statement in this genre was the well-known Life in the South of 1859 (New-York Historical Society), later given the more popular title of Old Kentucky Home. (1) The obvious narrative character of that picture became reduced and concentrated in the years following into a number of scenes of black life that indicate the seriousness with which the artist approached his subjects. “No one of our painters has more truly caught and perfectly delineated the American rustic and negro,” Henry Tuckerman claimed of Johnson in 1867.(2) Hindsight may give us a slightly different perspective, but one can safely say that Johnson, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins were among the few whose work rose above the stereotypical images of black life that preceded and were produced alongside their own.

The Utica picture is almost identical to a painting in the National Museum of American Art entitled The Lord is My Shepherd.(3) According to Tuckerman, The Chimney Corner had found its way into the collection of John Taylor Johnston by 1867;(4) the provenance of The Lord is My Shepherd is unclear, as is the date the painting first assumed that title. Yet the opening line of the Twenty-third Psalm is probably a more accurate representation of what Johnson ultimately meant the painting to convey‘—that the sober black man, the essence of humble piety, guaranteed the faith of the nation. It was a belief with direct parallels to earlier images of peasant life, especially those produced in rural Barbizon, in which tradition, hardship, and poverty were regarded as the true test of piety.

Surrounding the lone black man reading his lesson are all the signs of these so-called virtues. The forlorn and neglected setting is drawn from New England Kitchen (R. Philip Hanes, Jr., Winston-Salem, North Carolina), an interior by Johnson that must have slightly preceded The Chimney Corner.(5) The strong, gnarled hands of the subject attest to a life of toil, his dress and circumstances to enduring poverty. Yet his dignity remains, a factor of his stalwart form and the presence of divine grace—no small comfort during the turbulent years of the Civil War. Only by nourishing such individuals, Johnson seems to be saying, would America truly become a free and independent nation.

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