Its text, typically for its era, is a collaborative effort. It has neither catalogue entries nor a formal checklist. The heart of the book, however, is its six essays, which are contributed by the two curators, an academic art historian, and two scholars from outside the field of art history. These are solid essays entwining his art and much new biographical material. But she admirably fulfills her self-assigned task of providing a broad framework.
Hills proposes a full reading of the racial complexities and social ramifications of each painting.
A tone of moral urgency underlies much of the essay, provoked by Johnson's use of sympathetic images of African Americans to win fame and fortune after 1859, paired with his decision to drop the subject, at least publicly, after 1866. Contextualizing this apparent retreat from moral to tonal values, paralleled by the pragmatics of Reconstruction politics, prompts Hills to provide a rich, activist-inflected reading of the era's iconography of African Americans. Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer in the Postwar Decades. The fourth and sixth essays expand the realm of inquiry into literary and cultural history. Usefully distinguishing between contemporary and historic notions of sentimentality, Weiss plumbs the detail-filled writings of Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others, finding examples of scenes similar to Johnson's depictions of hearth, kitchen, and parlor.