“We do not know the specific catalyst for Johnson turning to the subject of slave life in 1857,” Patricia Hills wrote in “Eastman Johnson: Painting America,” but his exposure to both abolitionist ideas and enslaved people likely had something to do with it.
When Johnson chose to paint Mount Vernon after a visit there in spring 1857, he didn’t create a grand scene idolizing George Washington. Instead, the painting shows the mansion from the side, with a windowless white clapboard cabin at the center. An enslaved Black man sits in the cabin’s doorway, his body slumped with his hands on his knees. In six different paintings of the kitchen at Mount Vernon, Johnson depicted an enslaved woman laboring next to children. In both scenes, the physical surroundings are decaying: rotting wooden fences, bricks crumbling, plaster peeling from walls.
Johnson used his father’s D.C. yard as the backdrop for his next painting about slavery. He painted small groups of people interacting with each other: a White woman peeking around the corner; two young Black girls turning to see her coming into the yard; a woman and a man talking; a banjo player and a boy looking at him longingly; a child dancing to the music, holding a woman’s hands while a child lies next to them; a child and woman looking out the window. Unlike in many depictions of African Americans in art at the time, Johnson rendered each person fully, each with distinct skin tone, clothing style, posture and facial expressions. And just as in the Mount Vernon painting, the deterioration of the house where the enslaved people are gathered suggested that slavery was decaying the nation.
He named the painting “Negro Life at the South.” (Johnson, born in New England, had never traveled farther south in the United States than D.C., apart from Mount Vernon.) It was a scene of distinctly urban slavery, featuring a beige-brick rowhouse and an older, collapsing wooden house where the enslaved people probably lived.
When Johnson exhibited the painting at the National Academy of Design’s Annual Exhibition in 1859, most critics praised it. The editors of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine wrote that it was “conceived with great spirit, and painted with Dutch fidelity.” The New-York Tribune understood its abolitionist message, writing that it was “a sort of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of pictures” and presented “a sad picture of Southern Slavery.”
But to Southerners, Hills wrote, “the painting appeared as an apologia for slavery with its depiction of happy, well-fed enslaved people,” with the banjo player looking merry, the child dancing, the man and woman chatting, and everyone appearing idle. That attitude extended to some Northerners whose wealth originated in the slave system, like cotton broker William P. Wright, who bought the painting in 1859, and New York sugar refiner Robert Stuart, who purchased it from Wright’s estate in 1867.