Eastman Johnson

Eastman Johnson

(b.1824, Lovell, ME; d.1906, New York, NY)Hollyhocks, 1876Oil on canvas on wood paneled stretcher

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund

1946.7

Eastman Johnson (1824-1906)
Hollyhocks, 1876

Jonathan Eastman Johnson began his career in Boston as an apprentice in a lithographic shop, designing title pages for books and sheet music. In 1849 Johnson left the United States for Düsseldorf, Germany, where he studied at the academy and joined the studio of Emanuel Leutze, who was then working on the second version of his Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Johnson continued his studies in The Hague, studying the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters, and in Paris, where he enrolled in 1855 in the studio of Thomas Couture.

Settling in New York in 1858, Johnson opened a studio in the University Building and began work on Old Kentucky Home —Negro Life in the South (1859; The New-York Historical Society), which he exhibited to the acclaim of abolitionists and slave holders alike. The following years were devoted to Civil War subjects and to the American genre scenes for which he became best known. Hollyhocks depicts nine young women enjoying a summer afternoon in an old-fashioned garden. They quietly tend the blooming hollyhock plants, or casually converse beneath a vine-laden arbor, while enjoying the sun and fresh air. Their elegant attire and their pretty unlined faces attest to a carefree existence, free from any rigorous garden work. Refined outdoor activities became an accepted form of leisure after the Civil War, and, with the increased industrialization of the late nineteenth century, such paintings of pastoral bliss became popular among the newly urbanized elite.

The subject of women in an enclosed garden has a long tradition in art history. The enclosed garden, or hortus conclusus, was traditionally associated with the Garden of Eden, a theme with potent implications for artists of the New World, which was often referred to as the "New Eden." It was also identified with the purity of the Virgin Mary, and many late-nineteenth-century artists extended this analogy to women in general. An evocative floral language developed to suggest the fertility and beauty of the female sex. In Hollyhocks the flowers stand as tall as the women, their lyrical swaying attitudes mirroring the grace of their human counterparts. The women, like the hollyhocks, are arranged decoratively along the periphery of the compound, and the red, pink, and white of their gowns are the colors of hollyhock blooms. Enclosing the hollyhocks—and, by extension, the women—within the confines of a walled garden allowed them the benefits of air and light without exposing them to the dangers of the rapidly modernizing world. From this sheltered position, both the women and the flowers in Hollyhocks become beautiful, but passive, objects of contemplation.