Genre and Still Life Painting

Fiddling His Way, c. 1866
Object-Eastman Johnson, Fiddling His Way
Eastman Johnson’s genre subjects range from scenes of genteel leisure in the comfortable homes of bourgeois city dwellers to traditional rural pursuits such as communal harvests and husking bees. Fiddling His Way depicts an itinerant musician entertaining a family in a dim rustic interior. Johnson drew on firsthand studies of Dutch seventeenth-century masters and his training under the French painter Thomas Couture (1815–1879) to render objects and figures emerging with indefinite contours from shadowy, confined spaces. One of two works with this title painted in the same year, Fiddling His Way differs from the larger version, in the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, in several respects; most notably, the figure of the fiddler in the latter iteration is an African American. Scholars have suggested that the Terra Foundation’s work might have been the study for the Chrysler Museum’s painting.
Learn more about this painting on the Terra Foundation website.
Fiddling His Way, c. 1866
Genre and Still Life Painting

Fiddling His Way, c. 1866

The Home of the Red, White, and Blue, c. 1867–68

Fruit Piece: Apples on Tin Cups, 1864

Apple Picking, 1878

The Trap Sprung, 1844

Harvest of Cherries, 1866

Ships Unloading, New York, 1868

Picnic Party in the Woods, 1872

Still Life with Apple Blossoms in a Nautilus Shell, 1870

The Yankee Pedlar, 1872

The Jolly Flatboatmen, 1877–78

One Dollar Bill, 1890

The Whittling Boy, 1873

Old Time Letter Rack, 1894