Lot 13: EASTMAN JOHNSON1824 - 1906

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF DAVID C. COPLEY, LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA INTERESTING NEWS signed E. Johnson and dated 1872 (lower left) oil on panel 18 1/2 by 22 1/2 inches (47 by 57.2 cm)

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Detroit, Michigan, The Detroit Institute of Arts; Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati Art Museum; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Center; Eastman Johnson: Retrospective Exhibition, March-December 1972, no. 69, p. 82, illustrated San Diego, California, San Diego Museum of Art, Insights: Selections from San Diego Private Collections, April-June 1983

Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, Brooklyn, New York, 1999, fig. 100, p. 223, illustrated

James and Helen K. Copley, La Jolla, California, 1969 By descent in the family to the present owner

By the mid-1860s, Eastman Johnson had cultivated a reputation as one of the country's foremost portrait painters. Beyond these commissions however, which he produced for the entirety of his career, Johnson also pictured Americans as they engaged in everyday life: working, conversing and, quite frequently, reading and writing. After studying in Washington, D.C. and Boston—where he received numerous commissions from the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—Johnson traveled abroad to study the work of the European masters firsthand. He spent six years in Europe learning and cultivating a handling of light, color and composition that was grounded in academic style and technique. Perhaps the most significant of his experiences overseas was Johnson's apprenticeship as a student of Dutch art in The Hague. Particularly enamored with the work of Rembrandt, Johnson also drew profound inspiration from the work of the great 17th century Dutch genre painters and their exquisite representations of life’s most subtle moments of reprieve and introspection. “I find myself deriving much advantage from studying the splendid works of Rembrandt & a few other of the old Dutch masters,” he wrote in an 1852 letter, "who I find are only to be seen in Holland” (quoted in Teresa A. Carbone and Patricia Hills, Eastman Johnson: Painting America, Brooklyn, New York, 1999, p. 19). Painted in 1872, Interesting News reflects many of the stylistic and thematic influences Johnson absorbed in Europe. Patricia Hills writes: "In the 1870s Johnson painted several interiors of girls and women alone, engaged in private person activities--removed from the company of men and children. In many of these, light acts as an accent to the mood or to symbolize the presence of an outside agent. In Interesting News light from the window softly radiates across the painting and illuminates the quiet activity of the young girl reading the newspaper. In mood, in subject, and in the choice of its details--the map on the wall, the flower pot on the window sill--it is reminiscent of the hushed interiors of Vermeer" (Eastman Johnson, New York, 1972, pp. 82-83). In Interesting News, Johnson’s central figure has entirely disregarded her sewing materials—her scissors and thread now hang unused on the wall beside her—and instead finds herself engrossed in the day’s news. Johnson’s preoccupation with the motif of the reading female figure, however, extends beyond his admiration for Dutch precedents and grounds the artist’s work firmly in his own place and time. Although Johnson did not design his work with the intent of social criticism, much of his oeuvre reflects the national interests and concerns of his era. The frequency with which the artist depicted this subject could speak to his appreciation of literacy’s role as the impetus for independence and social mobility, or as an indication of the changing national mood in the wake of the devastating Civil War: the female attention to literacy now seemed a positive sign of their independence rather than an act of subversion. Johnson himself was married for the first time in 1869. His only child, a daughter, was born the next year. The new emphasis on domesticity his life enjoyed during this decade most likely exhibits Johnson’s great talent as a keen observer and great chronicler of the people and situations that surrounded him on a daily basis.