The name of Eastman Johnson is inscribed above the entrance to the  Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for a reason: He co-founded the world-famous institution.

Detail from The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket (1880) by Eastman Johnson.

Eastman Johnson was a Maine-born artist whose politically connected father brought him into contact with well-known portrait subjects.

Eastman Johnson self portrait

He was best known for painting scenes of everyday life and portraits of famous figures such as  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Eastman Johnson was born July 29, 1824 in Lovell, Maine, and grew up in Fryeburg and Augusta.

He was the eighth and last child of  Mary Kimball Chandler Johnson and Phillip Carrigan Johnson, who served as Maine’s secretary of state for two years before moving to Washington, D.C. as an appointee to the U.S. Naval Department.

Eastman had been apprenticed to a Boston lithographer in 1840. He joined his family in Washington, D.C., at about age 20. There he earned a living drawing crayon portraits , including John Quincy Adams and Dolly Madison

He studied in Europe before returning to New York City. He made his name with his masterpiece, a painting called Negro Life at the South, a street scene of slaves in Washington, D.C.

Negro Life at the South by Eastman Johnson

Eastman Johnson sympathetically depicted the plight of slaves and, while on an extended visit to Wisconsin, members of the Ojibwe tribe. He also painted genre scenes – everyday scenes of ordinary people – of husking bees, sugaring off, an old stagecoach and cranberry harvesting. In his time he was known as The American Rembrandt.

Sugaring Off at the Camp, Fryeburg, Maine by Eastman Johnson

Eastman Johnson died April 5, 1906.

This story was updated from the 2014 version.