The American painter Jonathan Eastman Johnson excelled at genre paintings of life in America during the 1860s and 1870s. He also drew and painted many portraits.

Eastman Johnson was born in August 1824 at Lovell, Maine. His family soon moved to nearby Fryeburg. He spent his youth in Augusta, the capital, for his father was Maine's secretary of state. At the age of 15 Johnson left home to work in a dry-goods store in New Hampshire. Because of his interest in drawing, he worked for a year in a lithographic shop in Boston. In 1842 he returned to Augusta and began making and selling crayon portraits at modest prices. Successful, he drew portraits in Cambridge, Mass., and Newport, R.I., and in 1845 he moved to Washington, D.C., where within a year he had drawn such famous people as Daniel Webster and Dolly Madison. In 1846 he moved to Boston at the invitation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose portrait he drew, as well as those of Longfellow's family and friends. He remained in Boston for 3 years.

It was not until 1848 that Johnson made his first oil painting, a portrait of his grandmother. The following year he went to Europe to improve his art. He studied for 2 years at the Royal Academy in Dusseldorf, Germany. After a brief visit to France and Italy, Johnson spent 3 1/2 years at The Hague, Holland, where he made a close study of Dutch 17th-century painting, particularly Rembrandt. Known in The Hague as the "American Rembrandt," he was offered, but refused, the post of court painter.

Intent on portraying American subjects, Johnson returned to America in 1855. Shortly afterward, while visiting a sister in Wisconsin, he made paintings of American Indians. In 1859 in Washington, D.C., he made his first large genre painting, titled Life in the South (today called Old Kentucky Home). This won him acclaim and election to the National Academy in New York