Landscape and Lagoon, New Rochelle

The often sublime, expansive topography characteristic of Johnson’s work as a Hudson River School painter was replaced late in his career by compositions of flat terrain, often, as in this drawing, dominated by a few large trees bordering a body of water in the foreground and admitting only a glimpse of a distant prospect at either side. This drawing was undoubtedly the model for the Museum’s painting “Bayside, New Rochelle, New York” (15.30.65). The site is characteristic of those that Johnson--following French Barbizon taste--preferred as subjects in his later career: domesticated, undramatic, and riparian. This image reflects the quiet, genteel refuge New Rochelle had been, before the arrival of an amusement park in the mid-1880s, which drew thousands of visitors from the metropolitan area each summer.