Sentiment and Sentimentality

What could be less fashionable in the hip, coolly efficient e-culture of the 21st century than a painting exhibition seeping with sentiment? The Eastman Johnson retrospective that opened recently at the San Diego Museum of Art is an unabashed--and quite captivating--celebration of the familial and the communal, when they operated at a pre-industrial pace. It abounds with tenderness, contains a fair share of beauty and can even claim a bit of social conscience. It is profoundly dated--Johnson was active in the latter half of the 19th century--but no more so than our perspective on it.

Johnson (1824-1906) was one of the most famous American artists of his day, the one Winslow Homer felt compelled to eclipse (and did, in the long run). He started out drawing and painting portraits, returning to portraiture throughout his life, but his reputation rests more on his genre paintings, which were highly praised in his time for being both accessible and edifying.

Curators Teresa Carbone of the Brooklyn Museum of Art (where the show opened last fall) and art historian Patricia Hills do a fine job, in the show and in the catalog, of contextualizing not only Johnson’s work but the critical responses to it, taking special care to point out the distinction between a 19th century definition of sentiment--pure and noble thought that stirs the soul--and sentimentality, a more treacly confection that tugs on the heartstrings. As it happens, Johnson’s work has plenty of both.

“Eastman Johnson: Painting America” covers the artist’s entire career through roughly 100 thematically arranged paintings and drawings. As was typical of aspiring artists at the time, Johnson trained in Europe (Dusseldorf, Germany, and after that The Hague), but once he returned to the U.S. in 1855, he stuck consistently with American subject matter, conforming to a demand for images reinforcing patriotic, nationalist sentiment. Distinctly American themes were de rigueur for painters as the country defined and redefined itself during the last, flux-filled decades of the 19th century. Slavery, civil war, emancipation, Reconstruction and the impact of the Industrial Revolution all made themselves felt in Johnson’s paintings.

The painting, in fact, that first established his reputation was one of the most politically loaded images of his career, though which way it was weighted was subject to some dispute. “Negro Life at the South” (1859) shows a group of African Americans at leisure on the patio of their dilapidated slave quarters, in the shadow of the far grander main house. It would be easy to dismiss the banjo-picking man, the dancing child and the rest of the characters in the scene as condescending, racist cliches. Supporters of slavery did actually point to the picture as evidence of the comfortable, happy existence enjoyed by indentured blacks, but Abolitionists found in it a more nuanced illustration of the richness and integrity of African American life, and in the ramshackle shelter a symbol of slavery’s impending demise.

If “Negro Life at the South” is problematic, “A Ride for Liberty--The Fugitive Slaves” (c. 1862)--a stunning, backlit vision of a black family on horseback, escaping toward Union lines--and many of his other images of blacks reassure that Johnson’s sentiment was noble, and that he sided with the Abolitionist cause.

After Johnson married in 1869 and had his only child in 1870, he turned frequently to domestic themes, painting some of the finest images in the show. In “Woman in a White Dress” (c. 1873), all else is extraneous to the rich, white swath of fabric cascading down the woman’s back in a diagonal that invigorates an otherwise static scene. The painting, more so than most in the show, is true to what Henry James wrote of Johnson: He “has the merit of being a real painter--of loving, for itself, the slow, caressing process of rendering an object.”

“Mother and Child” (1869), “The Little Convalescent” (c. 1872-80) and “Not at Home” (c. 1873) are similarly intimate and sensitively rendered moments snatched from the domestic flow. As a portraitist, Johnson was once referred to as America’s Rembrandt, but these images suggest that, while he was living in Holland, he may also have picked up some pointers from the Dutch masters of the domestic interior.

When Johnson turned to the landscape, he didn’t focus on the grandeur of the earth itself, like Bierstadt or Church. He found his version of the sublime in the social landscape, in the rituals of harvesting that drew a community together. “Husking Bee, Island of Nantucket” (1876) and “The Cranberry Harvest, Island of Nantucket” (1880) are spectacular human panoramas.

Retrospectives are always akin to excavations. As the historical evidence is dug up and laid out, one hopes for exquisite finds among the rubble. This show has its share of nuggets, and several even serve as portents of a more distilled Modernism to come in American art. Overall, though, an air of the wholesome and old-fashioned prevails, a moralizing quaintness at odds with the irony, cynicism and contrarian politics of today’s art world.

Johnson’s world feels distant, indeed. With the recent flick of the calendar page, we are separated from him by what seems like two centuries, not just one, and the remove can be intriguing and instructive as much as it can be, well, distancing. Johnson was a crowd-pleaser in his day, but the expectations of the crowd have changed. As co-curator Hills lamented nearly 30 years ago in a book about Johnson’s central position in the 19th century art scene as compared to his marginality in the 20th, one generation’s sentiment becomes another’s sentimentality, and the nationalism of one era devolves into the nostalgia of another.

* “Eastman Johnson: Painting America,” San Diego Museum of Art, Balboa Park, San Diego, through May 21. (619) 232-7931.