Eastman Johnson 1824-1906

Unknown Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany
Walter Zehnder, Wallisellen, Switzerland
Galerie Peyer, Zurich, Switzerland
Jacobo Blum, Caracas, Venezuela, 1969
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1970
Howard Garfinkle, Miami, Florida, 1972
Kennedy Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owners from the above, 1978 

London, Royal Academy of Arts, One Hundred and Fifth Royal Academy Exhibition, 1873, no. 1074
New York, National Academy of Design, Forty-Ninth Annual Exhibition, 1874, p. 25, no. 371 (possibly)
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Detroit, Michigan, The Detroit Institute of the Arts; Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati Art Museum; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Center, Eastman Johnson, March-December 1972, no. 68, pp. xxi, 76, 79, illustrated p. 78 (as The Peep) 
New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Faces and Places: Changing Images of 19th Century America, December 1972-January 1973, no. 57, illustrated (as The Peep)
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum; Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, An American Perspective: Nineteenth-Century Art from the Collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz, Jr., October 1981-September 1982, pp. 51-52, 81, 146-147, illustrated p. 146

James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds., Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Detroit, Michigan, 1968, vol. 3, p. 492
Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and their Works, 7th ed., New York, 1894, vol. 2, p. 12
Kennedy and Company, Exhibition of Charcoal Drawings by Eastman Johnson, New York, June 1920, p. 13
Kennedy Galleries, Rare American Masterpieces of the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries, vol. II, New York, 1974, no. 22, illustrated
Lynda Ayres, "An American perspective: nineteenth-century art from the collection of Jo Ann and Julian Ganz Jr.," The Magazine Antiques, January 1982, pp. 265-266, illustrated in color pl. XII

Very good original condition; under UV: fine.
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In 1849, Eastman Johnson traveled to Germany in an effort to master figure and genre subjects, first studying at the Düsseldorf Royal Academy and then, in 1851, with Emanuel Leutze. At the end of the year he traveled to The Hague, Netherlands, to study the Dutch masters, and with the exception of occasional excursions through Northern Europe, remained there until 1855, when he left for a brief period of study with the painter Thomas Couture. With his formal training complete, he returned to Washington and by 1858 had opened a studio in New York. One year later, he secured his nomination to the National Academy of Design by showing Life in the South (1859, New-York Historical Society) at the Academy's Annual Exhibition of 1859.

By the end of the 1860s, Johnson was well on his way to a successful career, but he felt his life was missing one important element. He wrote to his good friend Jervis McEntee in 1867, "If I had a good loving wife such as I can imagine & even know – I wouldn't care a rush for all the rest..." Fortunately he did not have to wait long, and by June of 1869 he had married Elizabeth Buckley, the daughter of a flour and iron merchant. Their only daughter Ethel, was born eleven months later, and Johnson's images of the early 1870s focus on subjects directly related to his home and family.

Teresa Carbone notes "In 1872 [Johnson and his wife] purchased the stone town house at 65 West 55^th St in which they would pass the length of their married life.... If his external surroundings were still shy of fashionable, the interior of their home nevertheless became the new center of his emotional and professional universe. In the relocation of his workspace to a domestic setting (on the uppermost floor) – a highly unusual move for an artist of Johnson's stature in New York during this period – he approximated the Dutch tradition wherein studios were contiguous with home. Perhaps more inclined by this situation to draw on the seminal imagery of domesticity coined by Dutch artists like [Pieter] de Hooch and [Gerrit] Dou, he found a new, intimist subject matter in his young wife and child and the space that they gracefully inhabited" (Eastman Johnson: Painting America, 1999, p. 74).

Bo Peep is a classic example of popular views of middle-class Victorian domesticity, set here on the upper floors of the Johnson household. Johnson was well-known for his skill at painting interiors in elaborate detail, and the fall front chest of drawers and prie-dieu with a Bible placed on top offer an inside look into the personal and private world of the artist. This intimate scene of maternal tenderness and affection speaks to the painter's personal connections with his models. Johnson's own daughter would have been around age two when the work was finished, and the woman closely resembles the figure in works like The Toilet (1873, Corcoran Gallery of Art), where his wife Elizabeth is known to have been the model. 

When Johnson exhibited one of his two versions of Bo Peep at the National Academy of Design in 1874 it drew generous praise. One critic from Appleton's Journal wrote: Bo-Peep is a most graceful and spirited painting of a child, who has bound a handkerchief round her mother's eyes, the child full of life and laughter, and the mother so sweet and tender as to recall one's pleasantest impression of such situations and such a relation. Eastman Johnson, more than any artist in New York, has the happy talent to render familiar scenes with elegance of style. His beautiful color and pleasant tone, added to spirit and completeness of conception, make his picture popular with everybody, while to amateurs they have the solid advantage of being really wrought from a high artistic standard."

Johnson's "happy talent" made possible a rare combination for an artist: critical, commercial and domestic success.