Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/127



R. EASTMAN JOHNSON is unquestionably the first name among American genre painters. He has a most human genius, wide and healthy, lacking fantasy and imagination, but perfectly sane and true, striking always the average experience, and admirably gifted to render the habitual conditions of American home life.

It seems to me that he has the same kind of mind as the great English story writer, George Eliot; a discriminating and conscientious mind, having a penchant, not for romantic themes, but for homely and racy ones, and never outside of the real world.

As a painter of the familiar, Mr. Johnson takes his rank next to the English Wilkie. Without the vulgarity of the Dutch painters, he has their love for sensible and ordinary people. Whenever Mr. Johnson has treated any subject of common life, he has made out of it more than any other American could have made out of it; when he has essayed the heroic, he has not been so successful.

It is as a painter of the fire-side, it is as a painter of incidents about the farm, and in the shop, that Mr. Johnson is best to us. He always finds a subject in which the incident is sufficient and the character positive. It would not be difficult to show how well he corresponds in art with Whittier in poetry. The limitations of both men are on the side of the imagination. Both alike keep close to the well-ordered and tranquil and narrow conditions of human life—conditions, however, out of which all the great and sane things of America have come—conditions that gave us the good Lincoln and the firm Grant. These men may be called the builders, as they are the strength of our life; they are not its beauty or ornament. A day comes when we do not ask for strength, but for grace; a day comes when we do not ask for security, but for the full play of the man. Then all sad renunciations, all joyless labor, seem too much like an injustice, and we resent and resist a life that makes man a jaded and grim worker when the world lies before his desires like a great untasted banquet. But so long as we keep perfectly sensible, we turn with the average man to consent to the conditions of our life, and with him look with satisfaction upon pictures which enable us to see its most picturesque phase. We are made to feel how much poetry, that is, how much that touches our hearts, is to be found in common life, when common life is rendered by George Eliot, by Whittier, or by Eastman Johnson.

When Mr. Johnson paints children his subject is common only in the sense that the daisy of the field is common. All the tenderness, all the sympathy of the man is expressed. I will say more, all the poetry of the man is expressed. In those sad and luminous faces of children we see that life is serious to the American from his childhood. In New England his chief object is to keep warm and to "get on," The boy warming his hands is to Mr. Johnson what the little French gourmand is to Theodore Frére.