1824-1906. Eastman Johnson is one of the most renown American genre painters of his time. Born in Lowell, Maine, his family moved to Augusta in 1834 due to his father's work in state government. Around 1840, Johnson became a crayon portraitist in Boston and worked at Bufford's Lithography Shop. It was in 1845 that Johnson moved to Washington, D.C., and produced black and white portraits of important people living there, including Dolly Madison and John Quincy Adams, to name a few. By 1846, Johnson was back in Boston, receiving commissions and patronage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He traveled to Germany in 1849 to study at the famed Düsseldorf Academy, where he met fellow-American artists, Emanuel Leutze and Worthington Whittredge. Johnson then moved to The Hague and from 1851 through 1855, studied the Dutch masters, inspired by their freer handling of paint and use of rich colors. He briefly studied with Thomas Couture in Paris in 1855, and returned to America at the end of that year.

Because Eastman Johnson was one of a small group of Americans to study art overseas in the mid-19th century, the extensive training he received served as an important link between his generation and the next, more modern group of artists. The impact of Johnson's sophisticated, skillfully rendered pictures coupled with remarkable domestic imagery, has not been surpassed by any other genre painter during this important period in history.