Biographic Information
Johnson was born in Lovell, Maine, the eighth and last child of Philip Carrigan Johnson (Secretary of State of Maine 1840, and Mary Kimball Chandler (born in New Hampshire, October 18, 1796, married 1818). His eldest brother, Commodore Philip Carrigan Johnson Jr. (father of Vice Admiral Alfred Wilkinson Johnson) was followed by his beloved sisters Harriet, Judith, Mary, Sarah, Nell and his brother Reuben. Eastman grew up in Fryeburg and Augusta, where the family lived at Pleasant Street and later at 61 Winthrop Street.
His career as an artist began when his father—the owner of several businesses, Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Maine (ancient Free and Accepted Masons) (1836–1844), and Secretary of State for Maine (1840)—was appointed by US President James Polk, after his patron the Governor of Maine John Fairfield entered the US Senate, as Chief Clerk in the Bureau of Construction, Equipment, and Repair of the Navy Department. From 1853, the family lived at 266 F Street, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets and just a few blocks from the White House and the Navy Department Offices, Washington DC. His father apprenticed him in 1840 to a Boston lithographer. In 1849 he moved to Düsseldorf, Germany where many artists, including many Americans, studied art, and took part in the Düsseldorf school of painting. There he was accepted into the studio Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, a German who had lived in the United States for a while before returning to Germany. Johnson then moved to The Hague and studied 17th century Dutch and Flemish masters. He ended his European travels in Paris, studying with the academic painter Thomas Couture in 1855 before returning to America in 1855 due to the death of his mother. In 1857 he lived and painted among the native Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) near Superior, Wisconsin. In 1859, he established a studio in New York city and secured his reputation as an American artist with an exhibition featuring his painting Negro Life at the South or as it is more popularly known Old Kentucky Home.
He was a member of the Union League Club of New York, which holds many of his paintings. In 1869 he married Elizabeth Buckley, and had one daughter, Ethel Eastman Johnson, who was born in 1870 and married Alfred Ronalds Conkling (nephew of Senator Roscoe Conkling) in 1896.
On his death, Eastman Johnson was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
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