Self-Portrait

In this self-portrait, Eastman Johnson labors over a desk in a warmly lit room, most likely his Manhattan studio on Washington Square. The painting’s dark palette and quiet mood recall seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings, whose style Johnson absorbed while studying at The Hague in the Netherlands. Some of the small framed paintings in the background were probably acquired during the artist’s time abroad, and the canvas itself is an artifact from that period of his life: x-radiographs reveal that Johnson painted this work over a copy of a Dutch portrait.