A landscape painter based in New York City and
associated with the second generation of Hudson River School painters, David
Johnson was noted for his ability to delineate accurately rock formations
and foliage. He was especially influenced by the work of Hudson River painters
Jasper Francis Cropsey, John Casilear, and John Frederick Kensett. He also
painted an occasional still life.
Johnson was born and raised in New York City, but little else is
known about his early life. He studied briefly with Cropsey in 1847, but said
that his best teacher was nature,[2]
which he utilized in his paintings from his frequent trips to the Hudson
River Valley, especially the areas around West Point and Fort Putnam. He painted
his first nature studies in 1847, and that year first received public acclaim
for his work exhibited at the National Academy of Design and the American Art
Union. In 1860, he was elected a full Academician.
Primarily he painted in the Northeast, doing views of the Catskills,
Adirondacks, Lake George,
the Hudson River and the White Mountains, where he worked in the early 1850s
with a colony of artists around North Conway. Occasionally he was known to have
visited Virginia on the eve of the American Civil War, where he painted the
famous
Natural Bridge. His early landscapes tend to be panoramas, rock studies, or
forest interiors. In the middle of his career, he adopted a more luminist style
and did tranquil marine scenes such as flowing rivers, and his later work showed
Tonalist influence of the French Barbizon School with pastoral subjects. It is
written that this period in his career was not much distinguished and that
"Influenced by the Barbizon style, his work became monotonous and less
articulate." In the 1880s, his reputation began to diminish, and by the time he
died his work was virtually unappreciated.[3]
Many years later, it was re-discovered by scholars who appreciated his great
skills of naturalist documentation, with a museum tour exhibition dedicated to
the artist being organized in 1989 and it toured through the Cornell University
Art Museum and the National Academy of Design, New York, NY
R.A.B.
