(Bonga had an Ojibwe wife as well as mother) changed his approach to painting. Certainly Johnson was successful in getting many Ojibwe to sit for him as subjects. In his drawings and paintings, Johnson portrayed Ojibwe people in a more intimate and relaxed manner than was usual for paintings of that period. Also unusual was that he often included the subject's names in the titles of the works. He did not focus solely on individual portraits, but also did paintings and sketches of scenes which include Ojibwe dwellings, St. Louis Bay, and other groupings of Ojibwe in everyday activities. Johnson left Wisconsin due to a widespread financial panic, which rendered his real estate investments there worthless. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to earn money by portrait commissions, and never returned to the subject of the Ojibwe. His paintings and sketches of the Ojibwe remained unsold during his lifetime. They are now owned by the St. Louis County Historical Society in Duluth, Minnesota. Slavery Negro Life at the South (1859), completed shortly before the Civil War began, is considered Johnson's masterpiece. Because of its complexity, it has been analyzed and interpreted at length by scholars. The painting depicts an urban "back street" scene of slaves in Washington, DC, although it became popularly known from that year as Old Kentucky Home (based on the song "My Old Kentucky Home" by Stephen Foster) and was referred to as showing plantation life. The painting shows a range of domestic activities behind a dilapidated house, with a house of better condition to the right. (The setting is the backyard of slave quarters near Johnson's father's house in Washington.) On the left in the foreground are a young black man and light-skinned woman courting, in the middle is a banjo player making music, where an adult woman dances with a child, as others look on. At the right edge, a young white woman in a refined white dress steps over a threshold from the house next door into this world, with another black figure behind her. (She is Johnson's sister.) An adult black woman looks out an upstairs window as she steadies a small light-skinned child sitting on the partially collapsed roof. The woman dancing with the child in the middle foreground has the darkest skin; nearly each individual is painted with a different skin tone. These variations among "people of color" reflect African-American society of