Journeys

Vieille Maison at Porte, around 1927 oil on burlap 61.0 x 51.0 cm (24 x 20 in.) Gift of the Harmon Foundation

Vieille Maison at Porte (detail)

In 1926, after Johnson studied art for five years at the National Academy of Design, his instructor Charles Hawthorne personally raised funds for him to spend a year of independent study in France. Paris was considered the center of the art world and was one of the few places to see a wide range of great art. People of many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds lived and worked in the city, and Hawthorne hoped that a black artist like Johnson would find greater support and opportunity in Paris than he could in the United States. Johnson described his time in Paris with the following words, "Paris: it was some experience, new life . . . Continued still-life, portrait painting, with many visits to art museums and galleries, with a little French on the side." Johnson chose an old house in Chartres, a town near Paris, as the subject for Vieille Maison (old house), which recalls the turn-of-the-century paintings of the French Impressionist artists Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley, whose works he most likely saw in galleries throughout Paris.

Search the World Wide Web for information about artists Pissarro, Monet, and Sisley. Do you think Vieille Maison is similar to the paintings of these artists?

Examine the detail of Vieille Maison. Can you see the marks made by Johnson's brushes? Look how he put small strokes of different colors next to each other in the painting. Can you see all of the individual colors when you look at the whole painting, or do your eyes mix the colors together?