returned to New England, settling in Boston in 1846 at the age of 22. In 1849, Johnson went overseas to Germany, for further studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. This had become a new center where many artists, including many Americans, studied art. They took part in the Düsseldorf school of painting. In January 1851, Johnson was accepted into the studio of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, a German who had lived in the United States for a while before returning to Germany. His major work completed there is his portrait of Worthington Whittredge.Johnson moved to The Hague, where he studied 17th-century Dutch and Flemish masters. He ended his European travels in Paris, studying with the academic painter Thomas Couture in 1855 before returning to the United States that year due to the death of his mother. In 1856, he visited his sister Sarah and her family in Superior, Wisconsin. His mixed-race guide Stephen Bonga, who was Ojibwe and African-American, took Johnson among the native Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) in the areas around Superior. Throughout 1857 Johnson frequently painted them in intimate, casual poses. According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, Johnson traveled with Bonga to the areas today known as Grand Portage National Monument, Apostle Islands National Monument, and Isle Royale National Park. By 1859, Johnson had returned to the East and established a studio in New York City. He secured his reputation as an American artist that year with an exhibit at the National Academy of Design featuring his painting, Negro Life at the South (1859) or, as it was popularly called, Old Kentucky Home. It was set in the urban back yards of Washington, DC rather than on a plantation. That year Johnson was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1860. Johnson also became a member of the Union League Club of New York, which holds many of his paintings. In 1869, at the age of 55, he married for the first time, to Elizabeth Buckley. They had one daughter, Ethel Eastman Johnson, born in 1870. Ethel married Alfred Ronalds Conkling (nephew of Senator Roscoe Conkling) in 1896. When he died in 1906 at age 81, Eastman Johnson was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Style Johnson's style is largely realistic in both subject matter and in execution. His charcoal sketches were not strongly influenced by period artists, but are