David Johnson

1827-1908

David Johnson (1827–1908) was a New York-born painter of the second generation of the Hudson River School. Trained briefly at the National Academy of Design's antique school and with Jasper Francis Cropsey, he made his first sketching trip to Kauterskill Clove in 1849 alongside John Frederick Kensett and John William Casilear, with whom he helped shape American Luminism. Johnson became a full Academician in 1861 and built his reputation on small, tightly painted, richly colored views of the Catskills, Lake George and the White Mountains, along with pastoral scenes of central New York that few contemporaries painted. His work, grounded in careful drawings of individual trees and precise natural light, reached its height of popularity in the mid-1870s, when he exhibited widely in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and at the 1877 Paris Salon. Later in his career his style shifted toward the looser handling of the French Barbizon school, a change that drew mixed reactions but reflected the broader difficulties Hudson River School painters faced as tastes evolved. He died in Walden, New York, in 1908; his paintings are held in major American museum collections.