American Art Collaborative

In the 1840s Eastman Johnson studied in Düsseldorf, Germany, with Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. Johnson also studied the work of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters in The Hague before ending his European travels in Paris, studying with the academic painter Thomas Couture in 1855. He spent the rest of his career in America. He is best known for his genre scenes and portraits. This charcoal study dates from the same year that he completed one of his best known paintings "A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves," which depicts a slave family riding to freedom.