American Art Collaborative

Eastman Johnson’s Lunchtime is a seemingly quintessential American painting in the way that it represents American values of honesty, simplicity, and directness. In the center of the composition two boys face each other. The older one, with puffy, food-filled cheeks, holds a spoon and a bowl and leans against a chair, while his much younger companion is on his knees and looking up at him. The simple domestic setting is appropriately represented by muted color relationships, largely based on a subdued range of hues.The two boys establish a triangular or pyramidal composition, as classical an arrangement and as firmly rooted as one could find in any Renaissance work. The composition as well as the chiaroscuro emphasize the central figures and add gravity to the everyday scene. Johnson’s highly skilled manipulation of traditional painterly and design elements combined with the seemingly simple approach to painting, at first glance seeming to reflect the purity and directness of American values, is in fact highly contrived.However charming the painting seems initially, there is more than anecdote being presented here. At the bottom right of the painting corncobs are arranged to form an architectural structure that in combination with a single cob on an empty spool, making the form of a cannon, create a toy fort. At the lower left, flower petals are scattered on the floor, as if they had casually blown in through the open doorway. Although the primary composition is formed by the two figures, the chair placed between them fills the central space, uniting the major compositional group. At the same time, the vertical spindles of the chair’s back function as a fence that divides the figures. This play on unity and separation is key to a fuller reading of the painting.The canvas is dated at the bottom right to 1865, the year that marked the end of the long Civil War. I believe this painting is an allegory of that event or, perhaps better stated, of its consequences. The children’s corncob-and-spool toys are instruments of war, albeit humble ones, while the flower petals on the other side of the composition suggest peace, a fitting and meaningful juxtaposition. Further, the chair functions here as a memorial for the losses incurred during the war, for those who are missing. In the Civil War era unoccupied chairs often served as gravemarkers, and a popular Civil War song written by George Frederick Root in 1861 was entitled “The Vacant Chair,” referring to a soldier who would never return to his family.There is compelling evidence of Johnson’s interest in the Civil War and in representing it: he was present at the front at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, and a number of his paintings represent specifically Civil War themes. Recognizing the iconographic meaning of Lunchtime, its anecdotal details become more notable. There is, in fact, no evidence to suggest that the title was Johnson’s own. However, a work by Johnson auctioned at the very end of 1865 titled Not Enough for Two would be a likely match for the Colby painting. At the end of the war, there was general concern about food and sustenance in America.The metaphor of brothers divided with insufficient resources to sustain them both would have been a poignant one for a country torn apart by a fratricidal civil war and would have resonated with other divisions that were of preeminent concern to Americans of the time. After all, America’s losses were multiple, its divisions manifold. If Johnson’s painting is quintessentially American, it is so not only because of the simplicity of its subject and the seeming directness with which it is portrayed, but also because it makes manifest the complicated, indeed contradictory, nature of America just at the end of the Civil War.David L. Simon