Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1841) went through many editions and, aside from its ethnographic value, became a source book for artists who had never seen a live Indian. Conscious of the red man s doom, Catlin had made good his vow that through his art, phoenix-like, they may rise from the stain of a painter s palette. His lack of training may actually have been a boon, for a sophisticated artist might have found the conditions under which he had to work too difficult, and those who came later and were trained could not help seeing in set formal patterns. Still, Catlin s paintings lack the intrinsic interest to match the fascination of the subject as Audubon s did. This is not to say that he lacked talent; despite his shortcomings he had an artist s eye for the dramatic sight or moment, for composition, pattern, and linear movement. His scenes of Indian life, though often not much more than short hand notations, are full of vivacity. native genre tradition was continued by Eastman Johnson , who painted domestic city life, country occupations and recreations, and the world of children. He was a more entertaining storyteller than his predecessors, his paintings were more technically expert than Mount s and Bingham s but inferior in depth of feeling. Most of his genre paintings are overslick in execution, sentimental emotionally and anecdotal in subject. The Johnson s most significant work is the Old Kentucky Home. It is one of the few canvases of the period that touched on social issues.1859, when Eastman Johnson painted his famous Old Kentucky Home, originally entitled Negro in the South, America was embroiled in the slavery issue, and in that context this idyllic, sentimental scene seems like wishful thinking. Johnson had been studying art abroad from 1849 to 1855, first in Disseldorf, then in the Hague, where he came to admire the Dutch seventeenth-century artists, especially Rembrandt; the soft light and vaporous shadows in Old Kentucky Home owe much to Rembrandt s inspired chiaroscuro. Johnson had been in Europe too long, for it was naive at this time for a Northerner to conceive of happiness as compatible with servitude. Old Kentucky Home, at first glance, seems completely at variance with HB Stowe s Uncle Tom s Cabin: well-fed slaves are seen content and relaxed, rather than oppressed and harrassed, and no masters are in sight except for one rather benign onlooker. But the Negroes live in squalour in the shadow of the white man s large and substantial house, partially visible in the upper right-hand portion of the painting.human warmth radiating from the Old Kentucky Home is not evident in many of Johnson s genre paintings of 1870 and later years. His In the Fields shows a group of people engaged in picking cranberries. It is a work that suggests comparison with Old Kentucky Home, for both paintings depict groups of people at leisure. While the Negroes entertain one another by strumming guitars, gossiping, and doing an impromptu dance, the cranberry pickers tend to be absorbed in their own thoughts [8, p. 201-211]. Emergence in 1820s of landscape painting was also linked with the growth of national consciousness after the end of the war with England (1812-1816). It was the first consciously national school of American painting. Later it was termed the Hudson River School because the artists first painted views of the Hudson Valley, and the places near which the...
