Jonathan Eastman Johnson (July 29, 1824 – April 5, 1906) was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance. He was best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His later works often show the influence of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; he was known as The American Rembrandt in his day.
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Eastman Johnson in the context of Fugitive slaves in the United States
Fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were historical terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe individuals who fled the institution of slavery in the United States. Modern historical scholarship often prefers the terms self-emancipated people or freedom seekers to acknowledge the active role these individuals took in claiming their own liberty.
The history of self-emancipation is linked to two federal laws that established the right of retrieval: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The legal status of a person escaping slavery was initially addressed in the United States Constitution's Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3), which mandated the return of such individuals to the party claiming ownership. This legal framework, in tension with resistance efforts like the Underground Railroad and Northern "personal liberty laws," intensified the sectional conflict between slaveholding states and free states, contributing significantly to the causes of the American Civil War.
Eastman Johnson in the context of A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves
A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves is an oil on paperboard painting by the American artist Eastman Johnson, from 1862. It depicts a family of African Americans fleeing enslavement in the Southern United States during the American Civil War. It is based on an event that Johnson claimed to have witnessed near Manassas, Virginia, on March 2, 1862.
Johnson painted three versions of the work: two are now in public collections; the location of the third is not known. According to the Brooklyn Museum, the work is considered "virtually unique in art of the period" in portraying the former slaves as "agents of their own freedom."